I made myself read every page of it, every report, because I owed it to my daughter not to look away from a single detail of what had been allowed to happen to her while I was gone.

Looking away was, after all, the exact failure that had let it happen in the first place.

I was done, for the rest of my life, with looking away.

Chapter 15 — My Own Excuses

I had to answer hard questions too.

In a small office, a CPS caseworker asked me, without cruelty but without mercy either, why I had accepted monthly excuses over the phone, why I had not pushed harder for direct video calls, why I had assumed that sending money was the same thing as being present.

No one charged me with a crime.