She smiled at him in that warm, condescendingly patient way most mothers do, weaving her fingers into his and, bringing his hand to her lips, kissed them one by one. Incessant hours of chewing had left his nails stubby and uneven, whose jagged edges left shallow scratches in their wake wherever an itch arose. There was that occasional thin streak of dried blood that lined the grooves, remaining proof of a pursued hangnail.

“Don’t bite your nails,” Mother scolded him playfully. “You’ll grow a hand in your stomach.” It was meant only to scare him at the time, but the very idea troubled his young mind much further than it was supposed to.

She hadn’t minded his nail biting as much back then as she did now. What worries she may have had about it were laid aside by the reassuring grins of the author on the back cover of child behavior books. Your little boy is going through a perfectly normal phase in his childhood, they said. He’ll grow out of it.

He didn’t.