They isolate you first, patiently, so that when the robbery comes there is no one left standing close enough to stop it.

Over two years, drop by drop, Rebecca had taught me to distrust my own daughter.

Every time Emily raised a concern, Rebecca was there afterward, gentle and wounded, framing it: your daughter doesn’t accept me, she’s grieving her mother, she’s jealous of your happiness. And every one of those framings was reasonable, was even kind-sounding, and each one drove a thin wedge a little deeper between my child and me, until the person best positioned to see the danger and warn me was the person I was least willing to hear.

That was not incidental to the scheme.