There is no version of Maren in those messages who is proud of what she did.

They are also not an apology, and they are certainly not a reckoning, and there are long stretches of them where she is doing something that I can only describe as managing a child.

What they mostly are is careful.

She is careful about me.

In four hundred messages she says approximately nothing negative about me, which I did not expect and which I have since come to think is the single most calculating thing in the whole correspondence, because a woman who never criticizes the father is a woman who is never going to be caught out by a fifteen-year-old repeating it.

She is careful about the others.