And then the grief hardened into the thing I actually needed, the cold clear thing, and I stopped being only his daughter and started also being what I am, which is the person who makes this stop.

Chapter 5 — What He Told Me

“Who did this,” I asked him, and my father, shaking, told me.

He told me in pieces, ashamed, apologizing, as abused people so often do, as though the shame belonged to him.

That was the part that broke me most, and it is the part I have carried into every case since: that my father apologized.

That he kept saying he was sorry — sorry for being a burden, sorry for not being stronger, sorry that I’d had to see, sorry, absurdly, monstrously, as though any fraction of it were his to be sorry for.