I carried her to the car, and buckled her into her seat, and checked her cheek under the parking-lot light, where a red mark was already forming.

She touched it with two small fingers and whispered, “Grandma mad.”

That hurt worse than anything Wendy had ever said to me, in two full years of saying cruel things, because it was not aimed at me at all.

Because it was not anger in my daughter’s voice.

It was confusion, and a kind of small, terrible acceptance — a two-year-old trying to understand why the grandmother who was supposed to love her had hurt her, and landing, in her toddler’s logic, on the idea that she must have made Grandma mad.

She was already, at two, beginning to blame herself.