Her cruelty was hers, chosen freely, and no failure of mine excuses a single moment of what she inflicted on my children.

But there is a difference between excuse and precondition, and honesty requires me to look at the precondition, which was mine.

An abuser like Chloe requires a specific set of circumstances to operate: an absent authority, an unsupervised space, children who have learned that their reports will not be heard.

And I had provided every one of those conditions, not maliciously, but through a sustained, years-long abdication that I had dressed up, in my own mind, as noble provision.

I told myself I was working so hard for my daughters.