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

I asked when she had last spoken to her own mother.

Six years, she said.

Six years.

I sat in that vinyl booth and did the arithmetic of it — six years of a mother in Omaha believing her daughter had chosen to vanish, six years of a daughter believing her mother had let her go — and I understood that what had been done here was not only to a body but to a whole web of love, cut strand by strand by a man who had wanted her with no one left to run to.

I took out my phone.