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.
Anouk did not write those sentences.
She wrote them down. He dictated them.
He came into her room on the wedding morning while I was downstairs having my hair done, and he told her that it would be easier for everybody if I had something to hold on to, and that if she was going to go she should go properly and not leave me wondering.
He stood there while she wrote it.
She asked him what she should put and he told her.
That is the sentence she said on my sofa and it is the one I hear.
She asked him what she should put. Eighteen years old, on the morning of her mother’s wedding, sitting on her own bed, asking the man who had spent the week frightening her what she should write to her mother.
