Suzanne’s apology was, in a strange way, a gift: proof, in the handwriting of one of the people who did it, that I had not made it up.

My daughters really had been raised inside a quiet, smiling machine that valued them less.

I hadn’t imagined the water.

And knowing I hadn’t imagined it made me trust, all over again, the decision to pull them out of it.

Chapter 15 — You Sing Now

In Madrid, my daughters and I built a life from nothing but the three of us and a garden full of flowers.

My mother welcomed us into a warm house on the edge of the city, near a good school the girls settled into faster than I’d dared hope.