Nobody dared to interrupt her.

And Chloe began to walk.

I have never in my life been so frightened and so proud at the same moment.

Every instinct I had was screaming at me to intervene, and every deeper thing I believed was telling me to hold still and let her go.

This was hers.

Caleb had given it to her, deliberately, and now I had to honor that gift by not snatching it back at the last second out of my own fear.

So I sat, with my hands folded in my lap the way Chloe’s had been folded for three years, and I watched my daughter do the bravest thing I had ever seen a person do, which was to walk, small and alone and unprotected, straight toward the source of all her pain, and to do it not because anyone was making her but because she had decided that she was finished being made to feel like nothing.