Brenda called me eight days later, having found out, and it was not a good conversation for the first twenty minutes.

She was furious — not about the email, about my having answered it — and then somewhere around minute twenty-five she stopped being furious and said the thing she had presumably been carrying since the night she pulled her daughter out of that dining room.

“Do you know what her class did in fourth grade? A family tree project.” Brenda’s voice was completely flat. “And Paige came home and asked me why we don’t have a picture of her grandparents.

And I have been lying to that child for four years, Nora, and every lie has been to protect her from a thing she was in the middle of and can’t remember.”

“Brenda—”

“I moved us two states away and I told myself it was to get away from my parents. It wasn’t. It was so nobody would tell her.” She exhaled. “She’s eleven.