Millie — I’ll tell you honestly, because you’ll want to know, and because Millie’s family shared it with everyone who followed the story. Millie fought hard, for a long time, surrounded by a community that never let her feel alone again. Her outcome is hers and her family’s to hold, and I won’t turn it into a tidy line in someone else’s story. What I can say is that whatever time Millie had, she had it as a beloved, included, ordinary kid, with a best friend at her side, in a school full of children who’d cut off their hair for her. She was never a monster again. She was never alone again. My daughter made sure of that, and I will be proud of it until the day I die.
Letty and I talk about her father often now, without the sharp grief of those first three months. He’s become, in our house, not an absence but a presence — the source of the lesson that made Letty who she is. When people ask me how a twelve-year-old thinks to do what she did, I tell them the truth: she learned it from her father, in the hardest classroom there is, and she was paying attention.
We do one thing, as a family, that came out of all this.
