They had taken the softest, best thing about my daughter and used it as the way in.

And then, when they had hurt her badly enough that even her gentleness failed, they had called her the unstable one — had taken a woman they had systematically terrorized and diagnosed her terror as instability, her fear as drama.

Lying there in that bed, shaking in my arms, my daughter was not unstable.

She was the sanest response possible to an insane cruelty: a kind person who had finally met people with no kindness in them and been broken against them.

And I swore, holding her, that the world would know which of them was which before I was done.

And then, from the doorway behind me, I heard laughter.