I want to rage at her. I want to shake her and slap her and force her to swallow those words. I have lived years believing she didn’t want me anymore. I know what to do with a mother who doesn’t want me. Anger is a shield against her, a weapon that protects me from the world. But it only works if she left me willingly. It only works if I can see her as callous and careless and useless to me now. If she is anything else, even a fraction of her, it will melt in the face of my empathy. It will change everything.

I think of Daniel. He would counsel me to stay calm. “Why did you?”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly like someone about to wring the truth from their lungs. “She had me over a barrel, Catia. I didn’t have a choice. And I was…I was getting worse.”

I feel her words like sandpaper in my mind, scratching out my memories of Moony—the Moony I knew. That Moony did not hold people she loved “over a barrel.” She did not leave them with no choice. Just because she says it doesn’t make it true, I tell myself. But that Moony also didn’t gamble tens of thousands of dollars away in secret. And a thing like that, once it’s out, does its damage with or without your permission. It plants seeds of doubt. It makes you break trust with your own perception of reality. It wreaks havoc in the halls of your memory. I can already feel my tenuous grasp on the story—her story, my story, our story—slipping.

“Worse?” It is the only part of the story that feels safe to handle.

“Sicker,” she says with a tremor in her voice. “Here.” She places a finger to her temple. “You remember?”

“Yes,” I admit. I remember. I remember the spinning, like a force with no gravity, a whirl with no center. It becomes a vacuum. It sucks all sense into the void. The world pitches on its axis, and the person who is your safe place becomes a nest of snares. That is how it feels when you are four, five, six—a carnival ride you cannot get off, living inside an upset stomach.

She nods. “She wanted me to get help.”

That sounded like a mother who wanted her daughter to be well, not a kidnapper.

“She promised to keep you safe if I went for treatment, if I voluntarily admitted myself.”

Everything slows down around me and becomes viscous, as if we are moving through honey. I didn’t know she had been committed. I didn’t like to think of her in a place like that, even if it was what she needed at the time.

“So, I did. I kept my end of the bargain. Bargain isn’t really the right word.”

“Just tell me.”