Chapter 20 — What I Owed Her

I did not sleep that night.

I sat up long after Noah had gone to bed, in the dark of my living room, with my daughter’s letter and the lab report on the coffee table in front of me, and I let myself feel all of it, the grief and the rage and the ten years of misunderstanding that I could never take back.

And somewhere in the long hours of that night, the grief and the rage settled into something harder and clearer and more useful.