Mae’s death leaves eight-year-old Sarah without her mother and becomes a defining rupture in her childhood: Sarah interprets Mae’s suffering and death as proof that she herself should never have been born, a conviction that later hardens into emotional withdrawal and mistrust.

Causes and Background

Mae’s death follows years of hardship. Alex Stafford had refused to acknowledge Sarah as his daughter, insisting that he already had legitimate children and had never wanted another. Sarah absorbed the rejection as personal blame, believing her birth had made her mother unhappy. After Alex left, Mae’s grief and illness further shaped the child’s sense that love brought pain rather than security.

In the winter Sarah was eight, Mae became ill but refused to see a doctor, saying she needed only rest. Her breathing grew increasingly labored. Before she died, she asked Rab to take care of Sarah, smiling as she had in the past.

Death and Sarah’s Grief

Mae died in the morning, with the first sunlight of spring on her face and her rosary clasped in her hands. Rab wept; Sarah initially felt too burdened to cry. She lay beside her mother and tried to warm her, then pleaded for Mae to wake. At last Sarah wept until exhaustion overtook her.

When men came to prepare Mae’s body, Sarah screamed at them to leave her alone. Seeing Mae wrapped in a sheet and the shroud sewn over her face, she fell silent. The men spoke as though she were not there. One gave her Mae’s rosary, and Sarah sat holding the beads while the men carried her mother away.

Sarah understood Mae’s death through the language of freedom, but turned that idea against herself: she imagined her mother free of her, and reasoned that without Sarah, Mae might have lived happily in a cottage in the country. When Rab failed to return that night, Sarah went to the docks and threw the rosary into a garbage scow, crying out at the heavens and receiving no answer.

Aftermath and Lasting Significance

The loss leaves Sarah alone and uncertain whether Rab will keep his promise. In the days that follow, she tries to care for him when he returns drunk, covering him with a blanket and telling herself that she will find a way to look after him. The reversal places a child in the role of caretaker even as she remains without dependable protection.

Years later, Sarah—now known as Angel—recalls her mother’s death and the circumstances that followed: Mae had become a prostitute, and Rab drank away the money. Angel remembers Mae dying with a smile and repeats the belief that her own birth was a terrible mistake. She then reveals that Rab sold her to a brothel. The childhood loss therefore stands not as an isolated bereavement but as the beginning of a sequence of abandonment and exploitation, and as a wound Angel has continued to interpret through self-blame.