THE LIABILITY CLAUSE
She let it come out ugly and repetitive and sometimes contradictory, because that was, she understood now, the actual difference between a confession and a strategy: a strategy could not afford to be any of those things, and a confession had to be, or it wasn't real.
At six she stopped. She read what she had written. It was eleven pages long, in her own handwriting, and it did not once try to make her sympathetic, and it did not once mention her father, because she understood, reading it back, that her father belonged to a different story, one she would tell Theo eventually, but not as an excuse, not braided into the confession itself where it could do the terrible convenient work of making