“I repeated the terrible things your mother said about you.

I judged you without ever once asking for your side.

I am so, so sorry.” And I forgave her, because she had been lied to by people expert at lying, and because her shame was real.

But it was a strange grief, to receive those apologies, because each one was also a reminder of how completely I had been abandoned, how readily the people who had known me my whole life had believed the worst of me on my parents’ word alone, how alone I had actually been in those first terrible weeks when it truly was my word against theirs.

And not everyone in the family was innocent.