She was going to feel a family around her, my sister’s steady hand, my body between her and the woman who had hurt her, the physical fact of not being alone.

Children who are the subject of a conflict between adults often feel, terribly, that they are the cause of it, that they are on trial, that the anger in the air is somehow theirs to answer for.

I wanted Hannah to feel the opposite: not accused but protected, not alone in the storm but surrounded, held, defended.

Where she stood in that confrontation mattered almost as much as what was said in it, and I made sure she stood inside the circle of the people who loved her.

And then I looked at the woman I had been three minutes from marrying, and I asked her the question that mattered.