Her mouth twisted. “I did my best.”
“Maybe. But your best hurt.”
She stepped back as if I had slapped her.
I did not apologize.
Then she said, very quietly, “Rose loved you more.”
The sentence was so naked, so childish, that it stunned me.
My grandmother.
The real wound.
All these years, beneath every criticism, every comparison, every punishment disguised as lesson, my mother had been competing with a dead woman for love she believed I had stolen.
“She loved me differently,” I said.
“She thought you were special.”
“She thought I was lonely.”
My mother looked away.
I remembered Grandma Rose brushing my hair when I was ten, after my mother had called it impossible. I remembered her telling me that some people mistake control for care because care requires tenderness and control only requires fear.
“Grandma saw me,” I said. “That wasn’t betrayal.”
My mother’s eyes shone, but her voice sharpened.
