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And so to believe at all

Secure in his love, certain of his intentions, e, and me

His shock took a darker turn to concern for hersons

This woman who actually believed she had a child that could move so fast no one could see her

She’d presented him with an insane and vividly detailed delusion about fairies and woainst them

She’d affixed her delusional paranoia to real world people and businesses, insisting a local, highly respected abbey was really a secret society of wouarded the world from these ancient, immortal monsters and, in Dublin, they posed as a bike courier company called PHI (that his office frequently used to dispatch files about town) so this special cult of gifted "fairy-killers" could keep tabs on their city, ever alert for threats to huhter had been so strong by the age of three that she’d shattered the toiletshe’d called "freeze-frame"

(I remembered that day I’d struck the commode with my little kid belly so hard it’d been black and blue for days We hadn’t been able to afford another toilet for ht one home, it was cracked and discolored and she had to repair it I have no idea where she found it Probably in sorâce--my mother told Seahter by keeping her locked up in a cage

For years

This wo sons

I remember the look on his face when I freeze-fraone ho hiet the answers I wanted without forcing the so fast I was undetectable, and whirled around and around the chair he was sitting in, unfurling thick, heavy rope behindhim securely to it

I reh for hith so enormous by then that I’d been able to sihtest strain

When I was done with Seaht, he believed

Accepted that every word my mother had told him was true, even wept at the end

If only he’d believed her sooner, if only he’d been willing to learn and accept, I otten a father to help raise me If only he’d come to the house, met me, kept an open mind, otten a wonderful mother for his sons The erosion would have stopped Erosions need new, solid soil to be brought in every now and then

She’d never wanted to keep e A woman without family, alone, without education, didn’t have otten it from anyone

And Rowena, that stone-cold bitch, never once offered aid I’d known that night I would one day kill the powerful head ones, and I’d begun to suspect Roas the only one with those answers

I knehat had broken my mother’s heart but I still didn’t knoe ended up where we ended up that fateful night I gained ed, horrified, Seamus had thrown my mom out of his car in the dark, twenty-twothe entire way He knew that because he’d followed her, arguing with hi whether he should pick her back up and take her straight to the nearest psychiatric facility

The irony: if he had, I’d have been found in e by social workers and freed from it Placed in a center, or foster care, I would have vanished in no tiotten her out Taken her home and taken care of her She wouldn’t have died