It would be easy to say that Beatrice was simply too clever, that her cruelty was too well disguised to confront, and there is some truth in that.

But it is not the whole truth.

The whole truth is that confronting Beatrice was frightening and exhausting and would have cost me something, would have made the holidays tense and the family fractured and my own life harder, and that on some level I had made a quiet trade, without ever admitting it to myself, in which my daughter absorbed the cuts so that I would not have to pay the price of stopping them.

I told myself I was keeping the peace for everyone’s sake.