Mireille wrote me a long letter from her cell before her trial — that she had confused love with the right to control her grown son, that every gift I gave her had made her feel small, that Braddock had only given a voice to a bitterness that was already in her.
I did not write back.
Healing does not require me to forgive the people who calculated how to hurt me, and I have stopped believing that it does.
On the day the judge handed down Mireille’s sentence, Lucien held my hand in the packed courtroom, and when we came out onto the plaza the storm had cleared to open blue sky.
Elspeth looked up at me, holding her small stuffed animal.
“Mommy, is all the scary stuff really over now?”