Even my six years, in some grim accounting, could be tallied and mourned and eventually moved past.
But there is no ledger for what Declan did to his daughter’s sense that the world is a safe place to stand.
You cannot wire it back.
You cannot restructure it.
A child learns, in a house like that one, a lesson that lives in the body long after the mind has forgiven — a flinch, a held breath, a reflex to make herself small and quiet when a voice rises.
That was the theft my father could not forgive, and neither can I, not because we are unforgiving people, but because it is the one debt in this whole story that can never actually be paid.
The most Declan could ever do now was stop adding to it.
And even that he would only manage from the other side of a locked door.
It was then that Rowena came rushing in, having finally understood, from a dozen panicked phone calls about frozen accounts, the size of what her family had done.
She ran to me with her arms open and her face rearranged into love.