Because I look like Mom.” And at that, I cried harder than I had cried since the day we buried Sarah.

I want to be honest about the layers of my failure, because it would be too easy to let my mother’s monstrousness absorb all the blame, and that would be its own kind of lie.

Yes, my mother severed our communication.

Yes, she poisoned five years with fabrications.

And it is true that, but for her lies, I would have known the truth and come home.

But underneath her active cruelty lay a passive failure that was entirely, unshareably mine: I did not visit.