She’s gone from our lives. The threat of the documented evidence keeps her away — she knows exactly what I have, and she knows what it would cost her if she ever surfaced. Some people you don’t need to destroy. You just need to make the cost of returning higher than they’re willing to pay, and then you close the door.
The harder part came after she left, and it was the part that mattered most.
I sat down with my daughters. And I apologized.
“I’m so sorry,” I told them, Valeria and Sofia both, Sofia clutching the rabbit I’d retrieved from that shelf myself. “Chloe was cruel to you, for a long time, and I didn’t see it, because I was away too much and I wasn’t paying enough attention to the most important thing in my life, which is you. That’s my fault. Not yours. You did nothing wrong. And I am never going to let anyone treat you like that again, and I’m going to be here so much more that you’ll get tired of me.”
