That was the assumption on which their entire operation had been built, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is the assumption behind so much of this kind of harm.

They had treated my distance as permanence.

They had looked at the ocean between us and concluded that it would always be there, that the daughter overseas was a fixed and faraway fact, a source of money and nothing more, someone who would go on believing whatever she was told because she was too far to check.

It never seems to occur to people like Julian and Chloe that distance is temporary, that the person on the other side of the world might get on a plane, might walk up the front path one ordinary evening, might turn out to have been paying closer attention all along than they assumed.

They had grown comfortable in my absence, had built their whole comfortable theft on the certainty of it.