I had loved her and, God forgive me, I had also pitied her a little, for being so easily ruled.

And it had all been wrong.

Behind that soft face, for twenty years, my mother had been fighting a war so quiet that even the man she was fighting never knew the full shape of it.

She had gathered evidence.

She had walked into a bank and set up a trust.

She had forced a confession out of a man who thought he’d gotten away clean.

And she had done every bit of it in secret, patiently, over decades, so that one day — a day she knew she wouldn’t live to see — her daughter would open a flour tin and finally be handed back her life.