Bitter people pulling her away from her children.

She had constructed, over fifteen years, an entire architecture of self-justification, a version of events in which she was not a woman who left but a woman who was somehow taken, a victim of circumstance and of my cruelty rather than the author of her own abandonment.

And I think she needed it.

I think a person cannot walk out on six children and live comfortably with themselves unless they build exactly that kind of story, unless they find a way to relocate the blame somewhere outside their own choices.

Laura had built her story well, and lived inside it for fifteen years, and grown so comfortable there that she had forgotten it was made of nothing, and could not survive being placed next to the truth.