For six months, an adult had been deciding, without Hannah’s consent and without mine, how Rebecca would exist in our home: hidden in a drawer, edited out of the common rooms, made into a shameful secret.

Pamela had appointed herself the curator of my daughter’s own mother’s memory, and had curated her toward erasure.

And so the memory cabinet was not really about display, or organization, or even remembrance.

It was about restoring to my daughter the authority that had been taken from her — the simple, fundamental right to decide, for herself, how her own mother would be remembered in her own home.

I could have built the cabinet myself, arranged it beautifully, chosen the perfect photographs.