But it had never been my job to hold together a thing that was crushing my daughter and me, and its breaking was not a failure but a rescue.

Let Patricia call me the destroyer.

I had destroyed a cage.

If that made me, in her telling, the villain of the family’s story, then I would be the villain, gladly, because the alternative, the heroine who kept the peace and stayed and let her daughter be raised inside the bars, was not a role I would take for anything in the world.

I had stopped being afraid of the accusation the moment I understood that being accused of destroying that particular family was not a shame to avoid but a thing to be proud of.