She never asked whether the children were all right.

Not once.

In every account she gave, she was the wronged party and the injured grandmother and the misunderstood matriarch, and in none of them did the actual children — the small bodies she had commented on and reached toward — ever appear as anything but props in the story of her own persecution.

I think that absence told me, finally and completely, that I had made the right decision.

A grandmother who had merely gone too far would have been frantic to know the children were unharmed.

Mine only wanted to know when the family would make me apologize.