My eighteen-year-old daughter vanished the day I got married and left a letter saying she never wanted to see me again. It was her handwriting. It took me eleven months to understand that they were not her sentences — and by then I knew exactly who had dictated them, and what he had asked her for three weeks before the wedding.
When she could talk, the first thing she said was: I need you to know I didn’t run away.
I said I knew. I did not know. I said it anyway.
And she said: Mom, I’ve been at Marta’s.
Marta Belhomme is Anouk’s godmother. She was Lazlo’s business partner for eleven years and she is the executor of his estate and she lives four hours north in Callowvale, and I had telephoned her twice in that month and she had told me, both times, that she had not heard from Anouk.
I said: Marta lied to me.
And my daughter said: I made her. I sat in her kitchen and I made her, and she cried about it, and she did it anyway, because I told her I needed one month.
I said one month for what.
And Anouk said: to get it in order.
She said: Mom, he’s a teacher and I’m eighteen and there’s no proof of anything. He never touched me. He never even raised his voice. If I’d come back here in week one with my mouth open and nothing in my hands, what exactly do you think would have happened?
I said I would have believed her.
