That is the detail I have never fully recovered from.

A grown woman had taken the deepest, most generous instinct in my child’s heart, her wish for her father to be happy, and had weaponized it against her, turning Hannah’s own love for me into the gag that kept her quiet.

For six months my daughter had suffered in silence, not because she was afraid of Pamela, but because she was trying to protect me.

There is no cruelty I can imagine more precisely engineered than that.