My stomach dropped.
“Don’t let anybody question my daughter without me.”
“No one’s questioning her.”
“Keep it that way. I’m leaving now.”
I grabbed my keys and ran.
“No one’s questioning her.”
The worst part was that less than 24 hours earlier, I’d been hugging Ariel because I thought she’d done one of the kindest things I’d ever seen.
***
My daughter was ten and quiet enough that adults sometimes mistook her silence for shyness.
It wasn’t.