“When I was eighteen, I got away. I left. I couldn’t take any more,” she looked down at the table, took a moment, and raised her head, “of the night visits. I wasn’t going to let him touch me again. I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have anything, but I knew I had to get away. I figured I’d either kill him or I’d kill myself if I didn’t leave. I couldn’t count on my mother to protect me. She had her bottle to protect her, and who could blame her. It was the only way she knew how to deal with the pain. The only one who could help me was me. So one night, I packed up what I had, which wasn’t much, and at four in the morning, I slipped away and never went back.” She looked at her husband and reached over for his hand. “Don took me away.”

But then her eyes shifted to Trixie. Her face started cracking. “And I left without my sister.”

Don slipped his arm around her. “Come on, honey.”

“If I had taken you with me,” she wept, holding Trixie’s hand, Miranda’s hand, “maybe your life, maybe things could have been better for you.”

“I got out too,” Trixie said.

“But not right away. You were only fifteen. You had to live with…you had to live with that for almost two more years.”

Claire Bennet grabbed a couple tissues, dabbed at her eyes. “Every night I thought about you, cried myself to sleep worrying about you, praying that you’d leave too.”

“I did, Claire.”

“But you went from one bad environment to another. Bikers, strip clubs, drugs.”

“As bad as it was, it was better than what I left behind,” Trixie said, although she didn’t say it with much conviction. “I didn’t exactly have what you might call a high opinion of myself. I didn’t believe I deserved anything good. I felt worthless.” She was holding back tears of her own. “But something changed when I had Katie.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“I’d seen how Claire had managed to survive, to pull her life together,” Trixie said. “She met Don, this wonderful, wonderful man.” He couldn’t keep himself from blushing. “They got an apartment, they got a house, and finally they got this house, they have a life. A normal, decent, life. A safe life. And I thought, that’s what I want for Katie. I didn’t want her to have a life like mine. She was barely a year old when her father died, was murdered, by a man he thought was his friend. These were the people I was associating with, these were the people I was working with day in and day out. And this was the world I was going to bring my daughter up in?