She held the sealed envelope for a while, turning it over in her hands.

“Maybe I’ll open it when I’m much older, Dad,” she said at last.

“But I don’t need her excuses right now.” And she put it, still sealed, in the bottom drawer of her desk.

I supported her choice completely, without a word of pressure in either direction, because the one thing this whole ordeal had taught me above all others was that the power to decide what happened next, the power over her own story, belonged to the child who had once been made to sit silent on a laundry-room floor.

It was hers now.