I Found My Daughter’s Note in Her Wet Backpack After I Picked Her Up From Her Dad’s — and Realized That Night Wasn’t the First
And there was more.
A note from Maya’s high school counselor, from around that same time.
Three months ago, my daughter had gone to her school counselor and asked — carefully, hypothetically, the way a frightened child asks a thing she needs to know — whether a parent was legally allowed to lock a child out of the house as a disciplinary measure, and to confiscate all of a child’s ways of communicating with the outside world.
Chapter 8 — Give Your Father a Chance
I put the phone down after that call, and I buried my face in my hands, because the thing I had to look at now was not what Richard had done.
It was what I had done.