She had taught Elodie that the labor was to please Daddy, that the fear was of Daddy’s anger, that the dinner withheld was Daddy’s rule — laundering her own cruelty through my authority so that my child would associate the terror not with the woman inflicting it but with the man who was supposed to protect her from it.

It was diabolical, and it was effective, and it had worked because I gave it room to work.

My daughter had spent a year afraid of me without my ever raising my voice, because a clever, cruel woman had borrowed my name to frighten her with, and I had been too checked-out to notice my own child flinching from me.

Standing there, hearing please hurry, Daddy, I understood that undoing this would be the work of years — that I would have to prove to my own daughter, slowly and patiently, that the father in my mother’s story had never been real, and that the real one would sooner cut off his hand than see her stand on that stool again.

Chapter 9 — Go to Your Room

I walked into the kitchen, ignoring every person in the apartment.