Rachel had gone pale. Her hands gripped the blanket so tightly her knuckles were white. She was looking at her mother as if she had never seen her before, and the pieces of a childhood that had never made sense were falling into place behind her eyes, one after another, each one landing wrong. The punishing training. The standards no child could meet. The years of being starved of warmth. All of it, seen again through a mother's terror.
"The vision broke me," Isolde said. Shame thickened every word. "I was weak and I was terrified, and I took the terror and I aimed it at you. I believed, in whatever madness I was living in, that if I made you hard enough, cold enough, alone enough, you might survive what I had seen. I thought if you didn't love me, you wouldn't grieve me when I was gone. I became a monster because I was too afraid to be a mother."
