She had decided.

My job, for once, was to trust her, to believe that the daughter I had spent seven years raising was strong enough to carry the thing she had chosen to carry, and to honor the gift her father had given her by not, at the last moment, snatching it back out of my own fear.

It was, in its way, the hardest parenting I have ever done: the parenting of restraint, of stepping back, of letting a child be exactly as brave as she has decided to be.

Chapter 22 — Chloe’s Choice