I was young, and I was flattered, and he knew exactly what he was doing, because men like him always know exactly what they are doing.

I have thought a great deal, since, about that line in her letter, about how careful she was even then, even dying, to try to protect me from blaming her.

She knew me.

She knew that my first grief-stricken instinct would be to find a way to fault her, not out of cruelty but out of the desperate parental need to believe that if only she had done something differently, she would still be alive, because a daughter who made a fatal mistake is somehow more bearable than a daughter destroyed by a predator she could not have escaped.

Chloe cut that off before I could even begin.