The hardest thing I ever had to accept, harder even than what she’d done, was how thoroughly I had helped her do it — how much easier I had made her work by insisting, year after year, on thinking the best of people who had shown me the worst.

That woman was gone. And the one standing in her place had stopped explaining anything away.

Chapter 3 — V. Do Not Touch

Eight weeks earlier, I had been cleaning out my mother’s hall closet. It was an ordinary favor on an ordinary afternoon.

My mother had asked me to sort through the boxes of old linens and photo albums stacked on the high shelf, the kind of task that falls to whichever daughter is nearby and agreeable, which had always been me.

I was up on a step stool, handing down shoeboxes and garment bags, when I found one box that didn’t match the others — smaller, heavier than a shoebox should be, shoved all the way to the back corner where the shelf met the wall.

I opened it out of nothing more than habit.