Chapter 31

At that age, when children learn to differentiate and understand various human emotions as displayed in the faces around them, The first emotion Brendan learned to decipher in his childhood was fear.

The close second had come as- not quite revulsion, but. Rather close.

His mother, in particular, had never quite learned to overcome her knee-jerk reaction of fear, terror horror at her own son. 

As surrounded as Brendan had been by legions of people who feared and worshipped his “Gift,” he had nonetheless had an intimate opportunity to learn these same emotions from his own mother’s face.

- and, to an extent, his father’s.

But a child’s connection to his mother is the most intimate, strange, world-defying thing in the world.

Being rejected by his own mother then had brought a crippling sense of alienation that cannot be replicated by the same rejection by his father, as devastating as both