“You are coming outside with me right now,” I told her, “and I promise you, on your mother’s memory, that no one is ever going to hide you from your own family again.” I meant it as more than a comfort in the moment; I meant it as a vow, and I have treated it as one ever since.

Hidden is exactly the right word for what had been done to her, and it goes deeper than a locked door.

She had been hidden in every sense: her grief hidden, her mother’s face hidden in a drawer, her own needs hidden behind a mask of not making trouble, her true situation hidden even from her father.

The whole machinery of what Brenda had built ran on hiding, on keeping things out of sight and out of the light.

And so the promise I made on that laundry-room floor, and the whole project of the years that followed, came down to a single opposite principle: no more hiding.