People ask whether I have forgiven her, and I have stopped giving the honest answer at dinner tables because it takes too long, so I will put it here.

I have not forgiven the seven weeks and I do not expect to.

I have looked for it, deliberately, with a professional, for about a year, and it is not there and I have stopped digging for it.

What I have instead is something more useful, which is that I no longer require her to be a bad person in order to organize my own life.

She was a woman raised by Corinne Rask, who at twenty-six was handed a lie by her mother and told that going along with it was what family meant, and who then spent nine years discovering that a lie of that size does not stay in the place you put it.