My father knew too much, and I was forcing him to look at the thing he had spent a decade refusing to see.

And my mother knew somewhere in between, enough to be afraid, not enough to have understood.

Every sentence I spoke landed differently on each of them, comforting the child, indicting the father, terrifying the mother, and I had to hold all three in my mind at once and speak in a way that served the one who mattered most in that moment, which was my daughter.

It was the hardest piece of speaking I have ever done, threading a single true story through three sets of ears that needed such different things from it.