But they were willing to do it.

They looked at my sleeping six-year-old and saw not a child but a resource to be harvested for their scheme, and that willingness — that reduction of my daughter to a swab — tells you everything about the people I had spent sixteen years calling family.

The irony is that the DNA proved Maya was Arthur’s.

The tragedy is that to Diego, and to Selina, and even in the end to Arthur, it would not have mattered if it had.

She was never real to them, as a person, at all.

She was only ever a means.