I was strategic in exactly the wrong direction.
I had poured a formidable will into the project of making myself smaller, because I had decided, somewhere long ago, that being small was the price of being kept.
It took my daughter’s blood on a marble floor to make me see what I had actually been building.
Not a shield.
A stage, on which they performed their cruelty, certain of their audience.
He hadn’t always been cruel — that’s the part that’s hardest to explain to people who weren’t there.
In the beginning Declan was sunlight.
He remembered the way I took my coffee and the name of the street I grew up pretending to be from.
He listened to me talk about North Horizon — the version of it I let him see — with his chin in his hand like there was nothing else in the room.
I mistook that attention for love, when it was really appraisal.