In the wake of my self-disclosure about Ma and Jack -- during the year or so that followed my discovery -- Dr. Shaw and I turned over and studied who my mother really had been: a fragile woman, victim in many ways -- of her mother, her husband. Of herself. She'd been wrong to aid and abet me in the way she had after the rape, to feed her own and my guilt, overindulging and tolerating overindulgence. But I came to realize that she'd done what she'd done out of fear and limited understanding. She'd been neither a saint nor a whore, but a fallible, sexual woman.

"You've made some remarkable strides thus far," Dr. Shaw told me at the end of our session one clear morning. "How does that make you feel?"

My answer, a smile, had nothing to do with happiness.

We tackled Daddy next. In those sessions that centered around my father, I began to notice a curious pattern: I'd be talking calmly about Daddy -- or sobbing something or whispering it -- then suddenly veer off into a memory of Jack.

"There's a connection between the two of them," I said abruptly one day. "Isn't there?"

Dr. Shaw leaned forward in his recliner.

"Isn't there?"

"That's not my decision," he said. "That's your decision."

For the next several months, he sat and listened as I wrote for an entire network of those connections, a kind of visualized rope ladder over the gorge of the two people in my life I still feared and hated most: Jack Speight and Tony Price. I told Dr. Shaw about the ladder and he kept leading me to the edge, coaxing me to step out cautiously. "How much do you weigh now?" he'd ask. "One-sixty? One sixty-five? The ladder can hold you. Go on."

Eventually, I reached the other side of the chasm and understood the differences between the two men. I no longer hated Daddy: he had been a shitty father and a shitty husband -- a man who'd made bad choices based on lust and coveting and then been too weak either to live with them or undo them. But he had not been a rapist.