She told me, eventually, that she had kept non-perishable snacks hidden in the bottom of her school backpack, because on some nights her punishment at her father’s house had been going to bed without dinner, and she had learned to make sure she always had something.

She told me how every ordinary flash of teenage frustration had been written down as aggression. And she told me the cruelest thing, the one that took me longest to get past — that Richard had told her, again and again, that if she ever complained to me, I would eventually grow tired of the drama and hand her over to him for good.

“He said you were already working so hard,” Maya told me one evening, staring at her hands.

“He said if I made your life complicated, you’d rather I just lived with him full-time.

That you’d be relieved.”

I turned her toward me, and I held her by both shoulders, and I made her look at me.