I was choosing, at each small fork, the reading of my daughter that asked the least of me.

And the terrible arithmetic of that is that a child can send up a hundred small flares, and if the person who should see them has a reason not to, not one of the hundred will land — because each flare alone is deniable, and the person who does not want to see keeps a fresh innocent explanation ready for every single one.

My daughter had not failed to signal.

I had succeeded, a hundred times over, at not seeing.

Chapter 6 — Silvia Vance

At seven the next morning I called Silvia Vance, the family law attorney who had handled my divorce four years before, and I walked her through the whole of it, and my hands did not stop shaking the entire time.