“I know that, Dad,” she said.

“I know exactly what she’s coming to do.

That’s precisely why I want her there.” I did not understand her, in that moment, and it frightened me a little, because I could not see what she saw.

I had spent fifteen years keeping Laura at a careful distance from the girls’ hearts, managing the wound of her, and here was my oldest daughter deliberately inviting the source of the wound into the most important day of her life.

It felt reckless to me, and dangerous, the impulse of someone who did not fully grasp how much harm her mother could still do.