"How did she describe me?"
"As someone who'd learned to hold complexity without needing to simplify it." A pause. "She also said you had the particular quality of people who've survived things that should have broken them but somehow didn't a kind of density, she called it. Like something that's been compressed."
"That's an unusual description."
"My mother has always been unusual." Claire said it with unmistakable love. "She told me about everything, eventually. The founding. What it became. You specifically. When I was forty-three she sat me down and told me the full truth of who she'd been and what she'd done and what she'd watched from a distance."
"How did you respond?"
"Badly, initially. Then better. Then" She stopped. "Then I understood that I had a mother who'd made terrible choices and also been genuinely trying to prevent terrible things and failed and lived with that failure for decades. Which is not a simple thing to be someone's child of."
