There were the birthday cards that came for every grandchild and skipped my daughter, and the toys bought for the cousins “because I was at the store anyway” that never once included her.

Each of these, alone, could be explained.

An oversight.

A coincidence.

A busy grandmother with a lot of grandchildren.

But I was Holly’s mother, and I kept the tally that no one else kept, and I knew the difference between an oversight and a pattern, and this was a pattern, drawn with a steady hand over three years.

And the cruelest part of the design was that objecting to any single cut would have made me the villain — the oversensitive one, the one who couldn’t let anything go, the one ruining a nice family occasion over a seating chart.

Gene had built a machine that ran on my silence, and for three years, God help me, I had given it the fuel, because I did not know yet how to fight something that never left a mark.