"To me. Postpartum depression. I'm told that a few weeks after my brother was born my mother became depressed. She wouldn't eat very much. She wouldn't leave her room except to go to the temple. One day she wanted to go to the temple and she couldn't find my brother's shoes. When the servants couldn't find them either, she dismissed the servants. She told them to not come back. When they were gone she made a bath for my brother and drowned him. My family says that maybe I fought back and it was too much trouble for her in the bathtub. Anyhow, she decided to drive me to an old contaminated well on my grandmother's estate, pried the boards loose that covered what was left of it, and dumped me in. There wasn't much water in it so I didn't drown, but I lost my eyesight. " Sang Huin felt an empathy as deep as the gods while he listened to the wind howling through the crack of the window. It was a barely audible murmuring of ineffable pain. It was palaver but it called to him somehow, pushing him from his malaise to the malaise of it all. Chapter Twenty-Four She could guess that the quick entrance into the trailer park, if it were such, was a reaction to her, the nefarious whore, whom he had ridden in sync to a female's need for pleasure many years earlier. Maybe as an afterthought to the decision of allowing his son to go off with Nathaniel, Rick's father recognized the address his son had gone to. If that were the case she supposed that she was in some way culpable for him driving quickly, if it were indeed done quickly, to remove his son. The inescapable fact zipped her up into its body bag: the removal had lead to the neighbor girl's ill fate and early demise.