Anwen doesn’t know the details, and won’t from me.

She knows her mother is steady, and that our life is our own, and that we tell each other the truth.

That last part matters more to me than anything the settlement returned.

I grew up, in the end, married to a man for whom truth was optional — a thing you used when convenient and set aside when it wasn’t — and I lived inside that so long I stopped noticing the low, constant cost of it.

What I want for my daughter is the opposite: a home where the truth is simply the water she swims in, where she never has to become a person who reads faces for lies because the faces around her aren’t lying.

So we practice it, in small ways.