That is what makes the part I missed so hard to forgive.

Because I did know Hannah.

I knew her favorite color and her worst fears and the exact pitch her voice took when she was pretending to be braver than she felt.

I knew her the way a single father who has raised a daughter mostly alone comes to know a child, which is thoroughly, in my bones.

And yet somehow, for the better part of a year, I did not see that she had gone quiet in a new way, that a particular light had dimmed in her, that she flinched, just slightly, whenever a certain person entered a room.

I have had to accept that knowing a child and paying attention to a child are two different things, and that in the season when I was busiest, and loneliest, and most desperate to believe I had found us a happy ending, I let the first substitute for the second.