“Because you’d just found out who I was,” she said, “and you were crying, and you called me Tessa, and I could not — Margaret, I could not put those two things in the same room.

I couldn’t be your foster daughter and the person who did that to you in the same hour. So I picked one and I put the other one in a drawer for a year.”

The clock did its thing.

“Was it worth it?” I said.

“Ava will never have to go to that man’s house on a Saturday,” Sabrina said. “So yes. And I’d do it again, and I’m sorry, and both of those are true and I’m not taking either one back to make you feel better.”

I looked at her across my own kitchen table — twenty-seven years old, teaching me to hold two things at once, which is a thing I apparently failed to teach her.