I lost the fiction that I had “made my peace,” and had to grieve, at forty-two, a childhood I had never let myself admit was stolen.

The order did not give any of that back.

It was never going to.

What it did was smaller and more important than restoration.

It drew a line the way a line is supposed to be drawn — legally, permanently, with a child’s name on the protected side of it — and it made certain that whatever we had failed to escape, the next generation would not have to survive.

Chapter 14 — What a Family Is