Those pictures cannot show whose hands moved any of it.
What they do is destroy the story that family was always going to tell, which is that Maia had a panic attack at an ordinary dinner.
I sat down next to her and put my phone face down.
“I’m not ringing anybody yet. Tell me what you need.”
“Change the locks,” she said. “Save every photograph. And don’t tell your mother which ward I’m on.”
I wanted names and dates and explanations. I asked the only thing that mattered.
“The older one. Was that her?”
And Maia looked at the band round her wrist, and told me about a Tuesday in the October, when I was working late and my mother let herself in and started on how the nursery was being done. It went out into the hall. My mother put her into the corner of the chest of drawers, and then told her that the pain was proof she was too emotional to be anybody’s mother.
She nearly rang me.
And then my mother reminded her that the whole family already thought the pregnancy had made her unstable.
“She said they’d all back her up,” Maia said. “She said you’d have to choose between your wife and everybody who raised you.”
