They had taken her love for me, the very best thing in her, and they had turned it into a leash.

They had convinced a mother that protecting her daughter meant suffering in silence, that speaking up would cost her everything, that her own child’s generosity was a fragile thing that would shatter if she leaned on it.

It was a masterpiece of cruelty, and its genius was that it used her goodness against her.

She had knelt on that patio for two years not because she was weak, but because she loved me, and they had known exactly how to weaponize that love.

I want to sit with the cruelty of what they had done to her mind, because it was in some ways worse than what they had done to her body, and it is the part that people underestimate.