Not once.

Through three years of small deliberate wounds, my daughter said please and thank you to the woman inflicting them, accepted the cheap gifts with both hands, called her Grandma, and tried, in her small hopeful way, to earn a warmth that was never coming.

Children do that.

They keep trying.

They keep extending their open, uncynical hearts to the very people who keep declining them, because a child cannot easily believe that an adult in their family simply does not wish them well; it is too frightening a thing to believe, so they assume instead that they themselves have not yet done enough to be loved, and they try harder.

Beatrice had a little girl trying, year after year, to earn her affection, and she used that trying as an occasion to wound her more precisely.