I have to be honest about the fear those five words dissolved, because it does me no credit and it was real.

In the hours between finding Maya and hearing her say her mother had tried to help her, a terrible suspicion had been growing in me, and it was this: that Elena had known.

That she had seen her daughter frightened and shrinking and had chosen, for whatever reason — love of the man, fear of him, the awful inertia that keeps people in bad houses — not to act.

I had built, in my own head, a version where my ex-wife was complicit, where she had let Julian do this, and I had begun, God forgive me, to hate her for it.

It is easy to hate the absent.

She wasn’t there to defend herself, and my terror needed somewhere to go, and she was the obvious target — the mother who wasn’t there, the mother who’d married the man, the mother whose house this was.