Denise had no answer to my question. She sat in that café with her messy bun and her dark circles, opening her mouth and closing it again, because there was nothing to say. She had told me to leave, and I had left, and now she wanted to be angry at the one outcome she had personally demanded. I watched her search for a way to make me the villain, and I watched her fail to find one.
Then her phone buzzed on the table between us. It was Martin. She glanced at the screen, and whatever she read there drained the last of the fight from her face. She turned the phone toward me without a word. And what was written in that message finally made my daughter understand exactly how much of her life I had been silently holding together.
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