I looked at her.

I looked at the woman I had shared a childhood with, a bedroom with, a whole first life with.

And then I looked down, deliberately, at the cold ceramic floor of that kitchen — the exact tile where my five-year-old daughter had lain shivering in the dark just four hours earlier, because this woman and that man had wanted her out of the way.

“I have three daughters,” I said, and my voice was quiet, and steady, and final.