Hal eats the mold (p. 11)

The other half of the signature: control that does not break even when the mind does. Orin's memory of the mold-panic diverges into full hysteria — the Moms running "around and around the garden's rectangle," lapping the crying child twice, screaming "My son ate this! Help!" — and yet what he cannot stop noting is the geometry of it, the plumb flight-lines, the ruler-straight footprints, the crisp martial turns held perfectly inside the string-marked square. Even at the outer limit of panic Avril cannot run a sloppy line. The hysteria is real and the precision is real, and their coexistence is the point: this is a person whose control persists inside her own breakdown, orbiting a fixed center in clean laps while she screams. The child, meanwhile, holds the mold out "like the report of some kind of audit" — the family's youngest already presenting evidence to a mother who receives everything as something to be managed.