I looked at my daughter and understood that I had not merely missed a birthday.
I had missed a cry for help.
I had been on the other end of a telephone line, asking whether she was happy, while she stood outside her own house, watching strangers celebrate in the home where she should have felt safest.
I reached across the table and took her hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked startled.
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Because I should have noticed.”
“You were working.”
“I was working for you. I should have made sure the money I earned was making your life better, not making it easier for someone to hurt you.”
She began to cry then, not quietly or cautiously, but with the kind of sobbing that comes when someone has spent months believing nobody will ever listen.
I moved around the table and held her.
She clung to my shirt.
