Penny arrived with Stewart, his parents, his sister Pamela, and an entourage of people I’d either briefly or never met. There was Stewart’s best friend, Tim, and his wife, Samantha, and a slew of Stewart’s multitudinous rotund aunties whom I vaguely recognized from the wedding, which now felt like a far-off dream. Why had they let her bring so many people? Why should these strangers have any say in my family’s fate? At least they would finally have to listen to us explain all of Penny’s history: the lying, the obsessions, the mysterious medical ailments. But Penny hadn’t just brought an army, she’d brought a cult. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, the social worker let each of them have their say, and they talked about how outrageous the idea of Penny abusing Ava was. She had thoroughly and systematically turned every last one of them against us. From their mouths we heard not only how wonderful Penny was but how awful we were: that Penny had been neglected by my parents, that my mother and I were plotting to get Ava away from her out of spite. It was so outlandish it was hard to figure out how to even defend ourselves. In their minds, they were on the righteous side of a young mother who’d been victimized by those meant to love and protect her. According to them, Penny had had a lifetime of bad health, and her needs had always come last, neglected in favor of the younger sibling, whose glory my parents were allegedly obsessed with to the exclusion of anything else. She’d woven a compelling fiction, and I could see in their eyes that they hated us.

By the time it was my mother’s turn to speak, it felt like we were the ones on trial.

“I love my daughter,” she said, barely keeping it together, “and I love my granddaughter. We don’t want to hurt Penny, but she needs help.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as one auntie leaned over to another and whispered something in her ear—she let out a loud scoff that morphed into a laugh. My mother halted for a moment and I could hear her taking a deep breath.

“Don’t laugh at my mother. Don’t you dare,” I burst out, staring daggers at the aunties, who rolled their eyes and held their hands up as though to say, Oh, pardon us. My mom took my hand.