The therapist asked me what all of those had in common.
I said they were all small.
She said: “They were all small, and they were all your daughter telling you something in the only register available to a nine-year-old, which is a question with the important part left out.
And the reason you didn’t hear it isn’t that you’re inattentive.
It’s that Pamela had already told you the story that made each one mean something harmless.”
Because she had.
That was the machinery of it, and I only saw it when it was laid end to end.
Hannah’s quietness was adjustment. The stomachaches were wedding excitement. The photographs were redecorating. The clinginess was her age.
Every single explanation was plausible.
Every single one arrived before I had a chance to form my own.
And there was one more thing on the list, at the bottom, which I did not put there until the second evening.
The whole eighteen months: Pamela never left me alone with my daughter for a whole day.
