My wedding — I had cried in the bride’s room beforehand, missing her, and she had been standing at the very back of the same church, watching me marry, weeping for the same reason from the opposite end of the aisle.

Every lonely milestone of my life turned out to have had my mother in it, just out of frame, and my father with a camera making sure she never missed a single one.

I had not been alone at any of those moments.

I had only believed I was.

And Clement had let me believe it — had borne the cruelty of watching me feel motherless, year after year — because the alternative was to risk the very safety he had given everything to build.

The albums were not a record of surveillance.