Every time I answered her fear with give him a chance, I moved myself, in her eyes, a little further from her side and a little closer to his.

Every time I asked her to be reasonable, to be patient, to be fair to the adults who were hurting her, I was casting a vote, and she counted the votes, the way children always do, with perfect and merciless accuracy.

And by the end she had tallied them up and concluded that her mother was not reliably on her team — that if it came to a real fight between her comfort and my peace, my peace might win.

That is the true cost of what I did.

It was not only that I failed to protect her from Richard.

It was that I taught her not to expect me to, so thoroughly that when she made her survival plan, she left me out of it, and put her faith instead in the mercy of passing strangers.