Lucien had not conspired with his mother.
He had not known.
But for ten years he had watched her undermine me in a hundred small ways — the corrections, the reversed decisions, the coldness dressed as concern — and every time, he had chosen the path of least resistance, which was to smooth it over, to tell me I was being sensitive, to keep the peace by asking me, always me, to absorb it.
He had not seen the poisoning because he had spent a decade training himself not to see his mother clearly, because seeing her clearly would have required him to do the hard thing and set a limit, and he had never once been willing to pay that price.
I had done the same, in my way — I had captioned everything kindly rather than confront it.
We had been partners in a shared not-looking, and the not-looking had left a door open, and something monstrous had walked through it.