‘There isn’t a whole truth.’

He looked away. ‘OK,’ he said.

‘I’m going up to Alex’s room for a minute,’ she said.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No. I want to be on my own.’

She let herself into the hotel and closed the door behind her.

The vines over the door at the back had grown over the glass. She looked at the keys hanging silently on the varnished board. Hubris. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth. She went up the stairs. The door to Alex’s bedroom was ajar. She looked all around, at the bed, and shelves, the wardrobe, and his guitar still leaning against the wall. She thrummed the strings, just to hear them in the quiet. It was easy this time. She went straight to the desk and picked up the Simone Weil anthology.

‘I’ll take this, if that’s OK,’ she said to the room.

She opened it, anywhere, flicking through pages. Circled and underlined, she read:

‘If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.’

Alex had circled it three times, in different pens. He had added ‘S’ onto ‘he’, and ‘her’, diagonally, over ‘him’. In the margin he had written, vertically –

‘I must desire this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for her, in order that she may not really have done evil.’

Green ink, blue and black. Like all his different imaginary hotel visitors, as if each of them were himself, returning, in a different skin. His life had been an extended struggle to absolve his mother. He hadn’t managed anything else, only that good fight. He had conceived of forgiving his abuser. It was cruel it was always left to the victims to be the bigger person, the better person, and no real punishment for the ones who hurt them, who carried on unchanged and unpunished. His pain was nothing to his mother, she made it her pain. She took everything from him, even his death. And he had forgiven her. To love the person who had broken you. That was brave. Then she thought Alex couldn’t help but love Liv. Maybe he had tried, but couldn’t, because she was his mother.