Lillian

Lillian, the mother of Apollo Kagwa, has kept from him the truth about the crisis that ended his childhood with Brian West. In a late phone call, she finally tells him that Brian tried to kill him and explains why she had not spoken of what happened. Her account is also an admission about memory: people may come to believe the version of events that best protects them, even when that version leaves out what they know.

Identity and the Call

The conversation begins with Apollo Kagwa calling Lillian, not the other way around. He has slipped away while Emma Valentine sleeps, intending to return with her to the forest and enter the cave. Because the return may be dangerous, he does not want to disappear without saying goodbye to his mother. His opening is simple, but Lillian’s response is strained; she whispers because she is close to choking up. The circumstances give the call two purposes at once: Apollo is reaching for his mother before a possible last journey, and he is about to ask for the history she has withheld.

Lillian’s first answer does not immediately resolve the past. Apollo asks why she had pretended that his father did not come back for him. She pauses long enough that Apollo checks whether the call has disconnected. The silence matters: the question presses on a story both of them have lived with, and the explanation requires her to acknowledge not only what Brian West did but also how she herself has narrated it.

The Lawyer’s Story and Lillian’s Recognition

Before describing the events at home, Lillian recalls her experience with Mr. Blackwood, a lawyer at the firm where she worked. He had required her to come in on Saturdays. Years later, he explained that the firm might have dismissed its newest employee and that weekend work could have helped her prove her value. Lillian allows that his account might have been partly true, but she believed it did not explain everything: she thought he had also pressured her for a date.

What unsettles her is not simply that Mr. Blackwood offered a self-serving explanation. After telling it repeatedly, he appeared to believe it himself. In his remembered version, he had helped Lillian keep her job; the pressure she associated with his conduct had disappeared. He could point to her continued employment and two promotions as evidence of his benevolence. Lillian does not reduce this to a straightforward lie. She recognizes that a person can select the account most flattering to himself and, with time, mistake it for the whole truth.

That recognition turns her example back upon her own silence. She tells Apollo that by saying nothing about his father, she may have been doing something similar—not only for herself, but for Brian West. The parallel does not make the two situations equivalent; instead, it gives Lillian a way to name the danger in her own version of events. Silence can conceal, and it can also permit a protective account to harden into memory.

What Happened at Home

Lillian dates the decisive scene to a day when she came home from work at one o’clock, bringing McDonald’s for herself and Apollo. She remembers feeling guilty and knowing that he liked the French fries. The ordinary detail establishes what she expected to be doing: returning to her child with food. Instead, the front door was unlocked and she heard the bath running. She feared Apollo might have gotten into the bath by himself and hurried to the bathroom.

There, she says, she found Brian West putting Apollo in danger. Lillian breaks off while trying to tell her son what she saw, and Apollo has to ask her to continue. She then states plainly that his father tried to kill him. She adds that Brian had planned to kill her and then himself. These are Lillian’s recollections, delivered years after the event; the text does not give a separate account of what happened in the bathroom. The central fact she now supplies is that the danger came from Apollo’s father, not from an unexplained disappearance or a father who simply failed to return.

Lillian’s Decision and the Unanswered Past

When Apollo asks why Brian acted as he did, Lillian connects the crisis to her decision to leave. She had served him with divorce papers and intended to take Apollo with her. In her account, Brian had suffered a terrible childhood, wanted a family intensely, and had spent years imagining what family life would be. She sees him as unable to adapt those childhood expectations to adult life. This is Lillian’s explanation of his state of mind, not a justification: the family he wanted did not prevent him from endangering the family he had.

Apollo asks whether she called the police. Lillian says she did not need to. She describes seeing her son in danger and becoming something else, then falls silent before explaining further. The story leaves that phrase unresolved. It does not specify what she did to Brian in that moment, and she does not fill in the details during the call. When Apollo asks where Brian is now, she answers that she knows exactly where he is and that he is where she left him. She gives no location or further account, preserving a boundary around the event even as she discloses its essential truth.

Relationship and Narrative Significance

The call changes what Apollo knows about both parents. Lillian does not present herself as an untouched witness to the past: by comparing her silence with Mr. Blackwood’s self-protective account, she accepts that she may have helped preserve a story that softened Brian’s role. Yet she also takes responsibility for finally telling Apollo what happened, including the fact that she acted to protect him. Her explanation remains partial, but it replaces the claim that Brian simply did not come back with a specific account of danger, separation, and Lillian’s decision to leave.

The conversation ends not with a full resolution but with care offered in the present. Lillian asks whether Apollo is eating and invites him to come over so she can make dinner. He says that he will eat soon and wants to visit her very soon. After the call’s disclosure, this ordinary invitation carries renewed weight: their relationship can continue beyond the truth she has just given him. Lillian’s role in the episode is therefore both maternal and narratively pivotal. She protects Apollo in the remembered crisis, and, much later, begins to repair the silence surrounding it without pretending that she can make the past simple.