Bea was twelve.

She heard that as what it was, which is a forecast.

In a house where the organizing fact of everybody’s life was that a woman had walked out and never come back, my third daughter was told, by everyone who loved her, from the age of seven, that she was that woman.

I did not stop it.

I did not stop it once.

I did not stop it because it did not occur to me for eleven years that it was a thing that needed stopping, and because I was at work every evening, and because I liked hearing it — and that is the part I had to say out loud in an office at forty-eight before I could get past it.