The five-year-olds become twenty-year-olds; the thirteen-year-old becomes a woman of twenty-eight.

And somewhere in there, without our noticing, the thing that was protection becomes something else, becomes a wall that keeps them out, a refusal to let them be the adults they have become, a way of insisting on carrying alone what they are now more than strong enough to help carry.

I had gone on protecting my daughters from a truth they had long since grown strong enough to hold, and in doing so I had denied them the chance to be, for me, what I had spent their whole lives being for them.

Samantha was not asking me to burden her.