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.
So I asked her outright. I sat on the end of her bed and I said: has something happened between you and Warrick?
And something went across my daughter’s face.
I saw it. I want that in the record because I have been over it four thousand times. It was not embarrassment and it was not teenage irritation. It was calculation. For about one second my eighteen-year-old was working out what would happen if she said it.
Then she looked away and said: just leave it alone.
I went and asked him.
He said she’s eighteen, her mother is getting married, that is an enormous thing for a girl who lost her father at nine. He said don’t push her. He said she’ll come to you when she’s ready and if you force it now she’ll dig in.
That is a reasonable sentence. He is a reasonable man. He says reasonable sentences to teenagers for a living, all day, professionally.
