I had no notion that my quiet, watchful nine-year-old had been carrying, for months, a secret and a plan and a weight that no child should ever have to carry, and that her request to attend the wedding was not the simple wish of a daughter but the final move in something she had been building alone, in silence, while I was too broken by my own grief to see it.

I thought I was letting my daughter go to a wedding.

I was, without knowing it, letting her go to do the thing she believed she had to do to protect her mother.

And that I did not see it — that she carried it alone, that she felt she had to — is a thing I will regret for the rest of my life, more than almost anything else in this entire story.

I want to be fair to myself about that regret, because I have spent a long time with it, and I have come to a more complicated understanding than pure self-blame.