Part Sixteen: Braids

I went back to work at eleven weeks and I have never been able to decide whether that was too early.

The first year was, in purely practical terms, the hardest of my life.

I was a single parent with a full-time job, a criminal case, a family case, a CPS case, a therapy schedule, and a child who could not be left with anybody she did not know.

I paid for all of it.

The settlement covered Daisy’s therapy and my medical, and it did not cover the fourteen months of my own therapy, which I started in the fifth month at Naomi’s insistence and which cost me eleven thousand dollars and was the best money I have ever spent.