“That’s her choice to make, not mine.”

Gwen agreed to read a letter my mother wrote, though she wouldn’t meet in person.

In it, my mother asked for nothing — no money, no property.

She admitted the whole campaign of intimidation and isolation, and for the first time she named Gwen’s cancer without calling it a lie.

Paige took much longer. For months she cast herself as the victim of a family betrayal.

Only after a coworker sold her own phone to afford her child’s medicine did Paige finally see what it meant to mock a dying woman.