She had painted herself as a grieving mother held at bay by a vengeful ex-husband, and she had sent it directly to Samantha, two weeks before the wedding, to prepare the ground.

I stared at the words, at the sheer inversion of them, at fifteen years of my life rewritten to make me the jailer and her the victim.

There is a particular violation in that, in having your own life stolen and rewritten by the very person who wronged you, and used as a weapon against you.

It was not enough for Laura to have abandoned us; she now needed a story in which the abandonment was somehow my doing, in which her absence was an exile I had imposed rather than a choice she had made.

And the cruelty of sending it to Samantha, of trying to poison my own daughter against me two weeks before her wedding, was almost more than I could take in.