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"I’m fine. It helps that it was expected.” I’m only saying what I think he wants to hear. I’m not sure how he’d react to the truth—that I’m relieved she’s gone. My mother only ever brought guilt into my life. Nothing less, nothing more. Just consistent guilt.
In this passage, Lowen is speaking to Corey about the death of her mother and pretending to feel a more conventional kind of grief than she really does. There’s a conspicuous deviation here between her verbal affirmation of being 'fine' and the internal relief Lowen feels after her mother’s passing. Even when she's talking to a trusted colleague and former romantic partner about her relationship with her mother, Lowen feels the need to conceal her true feelings. She believes that nobody will understand her feelings about her mother's passing, and she certainly doesn't want to explain the relationship to Corey. Lowen has always struggled with guilt, and with her mother's passing, she feels that some of it has been lifted.
I’ve been under the impression that Verity might have been a sociopath, but now I’m leaning more toward psychopath. I put the manuscript away and use Verity’s computer to refresh my memory of the exact definition for psychopath. I scroll through every personality trait. Pathological liar, cunning and manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness and lack of empathy, shallow emotional response.
This quotation comes after Lowen has just finished reading a particularly shocking part of Verity’s autobiography. Verity has just sexually assaulted Jeremy in his sleep, after he has denied her sex because it was too soon after she gave birth to their twins. Verity’s motivations for having sex with Jeremy in the previous chapter of So Be It don't appear to be sexual pleasure or intimacy. Rather, she wants to reassure herself that her and Jeremy’s relationship is still solid. Lowen wonders how anyone could warp the truth for something like that, and lists off a series of qualities the DSM-5 states are symptoms of antisocial personality disorders. She wonders whether Verity is a sociopath or a psychopath, but is unable to reach a conclusion.
[...] Jeremy was good at getting my thoughts out. Most of them, anyway. I didn’t want him to know this one. How could I admit that I’d finally fallen in love with one of our daughters without also admitting I had never loved either of them to begin with? I had to do something. Preoccupy him so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. I knew from experience that Jeremy couldn’t get the truth out of me if I had his {****} in my mouth.
In this passage, Verity describes being nervous about speaking too much to Jeremy about a nightmare she had about the twins, Harper and Chastin. In the dream, she realized that she had some warm feelings toward Chastin and felt nothing at all for Harper. She doesn’t want to risk disclosing anything to Jeremy, but she knows that he is good at making her tell the truth even when she doesn't want to. She employs a tactic that she uses regularly, which is to give him oral sex as a way of distracting him from an emergent situation. She implies that the only way to stop Jeremy from making her tell the truth is to have her mouth otherwise engaged. Here, as elsewhere, Verity uses sex to cover up the truth.
I want to make sure no one ever reads a word of this. Jeremy would never forgive himself. Never. If he found out the manuscript wasn’t real and that Verity never harmed Harper, he wouldn’t be able to survive that kind of truth. The truth that he murdered his innocent wife. That we murdered his innocent wife. If it even is the truth.
In this quote, Lowen is trying to reason with herself about the next actions she should take after having finished Verity’s letter. She's horrified by the idea that Verity might not actually have been a criminal. This would mean that she and Jeremy had killed an innocent woman. She resolves to take on the burden of keeping the secret herself, resolving that it is better to hide a possible truth than force the family to deal with the consequences of the letter in addition to So Be It. She believes that it's kinder to leave Jeremy in the dark about this particular aspect of the case. In this instance, Lowen’s concealment of the truth is intended to be a kindness.
