It was you.

It was always only ever you.” I watched those words land on Laura, and I watched her have no answer to them, because there was no answer.

For fifteen years the load-bearing beam of her entire self-justification had been the claim that I had turned the girls against her, that their coldness toward her was my doing and not the natural result of her own absence.

It let her believe that the daughters still loved her underneath, that they had merely been poisoned, that the estrangement was a wound inflicted by me rather than earned by her.