“Why did you leave this here?” she would yell at me, pointing to a cup I had forgotten on the side table. “You can’t do anything right.”

Robert was present during these moments, but he never said a thing. He just looked the other way, as if it wasn’t his problem, as if I wasn’t his mother.

There were nights when I stayed awake, listening to the wall clock tick every second. I wondered what I had done wrong. Where had I failed as a mother? Why did my son allow me to be treated this way?

Tears fell silently onto my pillow, and I dried them before dawn because I couldn’t show weakness. I couldn’t give them a reason to get rid of me.

But that afternoon, while I was preparing the vegetable soup that Robert loved so much as a boy, something broke.