It was the first time her firstborn seemed fragile, diminutive, and on the verge of tears. Was he not telling the truth this time? The truth that she loved him "in her twisted, spy-like way" and not as he needed? But what good were those endless lists of treacherous truths? The truth that he was the first guinea pig in her empty motherhood laboratory, that her wound became invisible before his, that her "human condition" collapsed under the constraints of her motherhood, that she "knew what she could and could not do," and that she could not demolish everything she had worked so hard to build: every white hair on her head, every wrinkle under her eyes, every extreme idea, every strange metaphor, and every ruin in her heart, for his sake, and the truth that love was conditional, conditional, and that they had lied about it, and that the world was unfair, and that misunderstanding was inevitable and seemingly: eternal, and she did not know where her role as a mother ended and her condition as a woman began? And what could she do with the brutal contradiction between the two, in that she wanted to take him back under her wing like a wet chick, and in that she had never forgiven him for being "the son of his monstrous place in his monstrous time"?