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.
My daughter believed him.
That is the part I cannot get past, and it is not about Warrick.
She was eighteen years old and she genuinely believed that if it came down to her word against his, her own mother would take his.
PART 4
Then there is the letter.
I read that letter four hundred times in a month. Half a page, on paper from the pad by the phone, in my daughter’s handwriting, which I have twelve years of birthday cards to compare it to.
I need to be on my own for a while. This isn’t about you. Please don’t look for me, it will only make it harder. I never want to see you again.
