Laura’s hands had begun to shake.

“Your bitter father,” she tried, “poisoned your mind against me.

He turned all of you against me.” And Samantha, without raising her voice even slightly, delivered the sentence that ended that argument for good.

“No, he didn’t,” she said.

“He did the opposite.

He protected your reputation for fifteen years.

He kept the ugliest truth about you locked in a closet so we wouldn’t have to know it, long after you had stopped earning a single ounce of that protection.

If you want to know who turned us against you, Mom, it wasn’t him.