She simply reported, honestly, on the work she was doing to become a person who could be trusted, and accepted that Hannah might never want to see her, and kept writing anyway.

It was the first genuinely unselfish thing I had ever seen my sister do.

I want to say something about forgiveness here, and about why I never once pushed Hannah toward it, because I think our culture gets this badly wrong, and getting it wrong does real harm to the people who have been hurt.

There is a widespread belief that forgiveness is something the victim owes — that a good person, a healed person, a spiritually mature person, forgives those who wronged them, and that withholding forgiveness is a kind of failure, a bitterness, a refusal to move on.

I do not believe that, and I refused to let anyone impose it on my daughter.