She was asking me to finally let her grow all the way up, by letting her help.”

Chapter 10 — She Wrote to Me Two Weeks Ago

Then Samantha opened her folder, and she pulled out a single printed sheet of paper, and she slid it across the table to me.

“She wrote to me,” she said.

“Two weeks ago.”

I picked it up and read it, and as I read, something cold settled into my chest.

In it, Laura had told our daughter a careful and poisonous story.

She had written that I was bitter, that I had made all contact between her and the girls impossible, that I had deliberately kept her children away from her over the years in order to punish her for leaving.