The one who mattered.

And Maya, at six, had already absorbed the lesson that her grandmother’s love was a finite resource, that it was being redirected, and that a boy she had never met was about to inherit not only the family fortune but the family affection, including, in her small imagination, her toys.

That my daughter’s first thought, leaving her father, was that a boy would now get her things — that is the whole poison of what that family taught, distilled into one child’s question in the back of a cab.

Chapter 4 — One Girl to Start

I want to explain the atmosphere my daughters grew up breathing, because it is the true beginning of this story, long before any fraud.

When Chloe was born, my mother-in-law held her, and smiled, and said that one girl was fine, “to start.” When Cami was born two years later, Beatrice asked, at the hospital, when we were going to try for a boy.