Morrison nodded like she understood. “That’s normal,” she replied. “What she did wasn’t just a crime. It was intimacy weaponized. People don’t bounce back clean from that.”
That phrase lodged in my mind: intimacy weaponized.
Sophie struggled the most with the idea that Margaret had been kind to her sometimes. Kids don’t like mixed signals; they want people to be one thing. Margaret had baked cookies with Sophie, had complimented her drawings, had braided her hair once. And Sophie couldn’t reconcile that with the woman who laughed about killing me.
One night Sophie sat on my living room floor with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and said, “Maybe she was only nice when she needed us to trust her.”
Her voice was small, but her brain was sharp.
“That’s possible,” I said.
Sophie stared at her hands. “That’s scary.”
“It is,” I agreed. “But it also means you learned something early that a lot of adults learn too late.”
Sophie looked up. “What?”
“That kindness and goodness aren’t always the same,” I said. “Goodness doesn’t need an audience. It doesn’t need payoff.”
She considered that, then nodded slowly as if filing it away for the rest of her life.