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.
He asked for two hundred and sixty thousand dollars of her father’s money.
Anouk has described that conversation to me twice and to a lawyer once, and what she keeps returning to is how well it was built.
He did not open with the number. He opened by asking how she was doing about the wedding, and he listened to the answer.
He said he had noticed she was finding it hard and he wanted her to know he thought that was completely normal.
He said he had been thinking about how to make her feel that this was still her house.
And then he arrived at the property, and the bank, and the timing, over about twenty minutes, so that by the time the number was in the room it was the fourth or fifth thing in a conversation that had started with her feelings.
