Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

There was one time she tried to run.

She told me about it quietly, looking at her hands, and it is the part of her story that I think about most, because it is the part where the world almost saved her and then, believing a lie, handed her back.

In the spring, she slipped out before dawn and walked miles along the dark highway until a long-haul trucker stopped and offered her a ride to the nearest town.

For a few miles she was free.