I held it just long enough for her to understand, and then I let go, because I did not need to hurt her; I only needed her to know, in her body and not just her mind, that the era in which she could reach for my children was over.

She stepped back.

She did not reach again.

Felicia’s wrist was rigid in my grip, and for a second we simply stood there, she and I, ten years compressed into the six inches between her manicured hand and my daughter’s coat, and then I let her go, and she stepped back, and the silence around us was no longer the polite silence of a funeral.

It had become something else.