If she had come to me a year earlier, sobbing, with no proof at all, and simply said I am afraid of your husband and I think he means to hurt us — I like to believe, now, that some part of me would have listened, that a daughter can hear her mother’s fear even without evidence.

But she did not trust that.

Years of Richard had taught her, too, not to trust it.

And so she chose the terrible, solitary, self-immolating path of the mother who protects in silence, and it almost took her from me.

I have forgiven her.

Of course I have forgiven her.