And on most days I grieved that my daughter had needed to build it at all, that a mother’s abandonment had required a thirteen-year-old to learn to armor her own face.

But on this particular day, facing this particular woman, I was glad of it.

Whatever Laura was hoping to see when she looked at her eldest daughter, some crack of the old need, some hunger for her mother’s approval that she could use, she found only that smooth polite surface, giving her nothing to work with.

Samantha had spent fifteen years becoming a woman her mother could not manipulate.

And her mother had no idea, yet, how completely that was true.