My daughter’s body was, without her knowledge or consent, made into an instrument of her own dispossession.

They reached into her room while she slept and took a piece of her and used it against her, to prove that a stranger’s boy deserved what should have been, in part, hers.

There is nothing satisfying in that, and I hold it separately from the irony.

When I finally understood what had been done to Maya’s cheek that night, my first feeling was not the cold appreciation of a clever reversal.

It was the oldest feeling I have, the one that predates every other, the animal fury of a mother who has learned that someone entered her child’s room in the dark and did a thing to her.

That they did it to a sample, and not to the child herself, that Maya slept through it and was never physically harmed, is the only thing that has let me carry it at all.