I watched my youngest daughter absorb that, the fact of a photograph of her own small self that her mother had refused even to open, and I ached for her, but I did not regret that she was learning it.

There is a kind of clarity that can only come from seeing the concrete evidence, and Daisy, who had spent her whole life with only the abstract fact of a mother who was not there, was seeing now, in a faded photograph marked return to sender, the specific concrete texture of that absence.

It was not that her mother had been prevented from knowing her.

It was that her mother had been offered the chance to know her, in the simplest possible way, a photograph of a little girl’s first day of school, and had sent it back without so much as opening the envelope.