Maya had gotten lazy.

Maya demanded designer clothes.

Maya hung out on the streets.

Maya was taking advantage of me because she knew I was far away.

And, like an idiot, like a fool who deserved everything that guilt would later do to him, I believed her.

I believed my mother’s voice, month after month, over the daughter I could not see.

It is the single greatest mistake of my life, and it is the reason I booked a flight to Austin that afternoon, determined not to comfort my child, but to discipline her.

I have asked myself, ten thousand times since, how I could have believed my mother over my own daughter, and the answer, when I finally forced myself to look at it honestly, is not flattering, but it is important, because I think it is the same trap that swallows a great many parents.

I believed my mother because she was the adult.

Because she was my mother, an authority I had deferred to my whole life.

Because her voice was confident and fluent and certain, and Maya’s, on the rare occasions I heard it at all, was small and hesitant and easily interrupted.

When an adult and a child give you two different accounts, our every instinct, drilled into us since we ourselves were children, is to trust the adult, and that instinct is so deep that we do not even experience it as a choice; we simply believe the grown-up and correct the child.

And most of the time, perhaps, that instinct serves.

But it has a catastrophic failure mode, which is this: when the adult is the one lying, the child has no one.