There was no single conversation that erased what had been done to them.

What there was, instead, was a beginning.

Supervised weekend visits at first, careful and chaperoned, that over the months loosened into long phone calls, shared birthdays, whole weekends, Daisy’s small overnight bag appearing by our door.

Two families learning, slowly and for real this time, how to share two children who had been wrongly taught that they had to be divided.

That was the lie I most wanted to kill, the one that had done the deepest damage of all — the idea, planted in a frightened fourteen-year-old by well-meaning adults, that love is a fixed quantity, that to give it to one person is to take it from another, that a family is a room with a strict occupancy limit and someone must always be turned away at the door.