It was my fault, all of it. It was all my fault for loving him, for marrying him, for not knowing and then not seeing. I didn’t know, I never guessed, but it was still my fault. I should have known.

Cinderella was only a year old when I met Henri. My girls and I had been on our own for six years already; it was six years since their father had died and six months since Cinderella’s mother’s passing. Drusilla was ten and Anastasia was eight and we were a good team still. We did everything together, went everywhere together, talked about everything and shared everything…and then I met Henri.

I thought he was such a wonderful father. He still was so full of the fresh grief from the loss of his wife and Cinderella was his entire world. I watched how he put every ounce of his energy into her care, into easing her motherlessness and making sure she never felt bereft of that which she could not even remember but would never forget. He was wonderful. And Cinderella! That golden baby was a beauty and a delight. She was clever and precious and funny…everything a baby should be! I fell in love with her immediately.

I met Henri when we were both working on a merger between our two companies. Late nights were hard on us both, being single parents, and we soon managed to feel this out about each other and take the plunge into suggesting that we work at one home or another on late nights, with the kids. I don’t remember who suggested this first, and can scarcely believe that either of us would have dared to so depart from the corporate culture of No Kids Allowed, but somehow, we did. I eventually came to see that bit of bravery as a marriage of shared priorities, a willingness to put family first that was rare and maybe even revolutionary…proof that we were soul mates. Drusilla helped a lot by keeping an eye on the younger girls during these meetings and everyone seemed to have fun.

The deal took three months to finish and was an unqualified success, earning big bucks for both of our companies and big bonuses for us. When it was finished, there was no real reason for us to see each other anymore. But, of course, we did. By that time, I was head over heels for both Cinderella and Henri and my girls seemed just as attached. Our team of three became a tea m of five. We all began spending all of our free time together and by the time Cinderella was two years old, I had married Henri and began the adoption proceedings. By the time she was three, she was mine, too, and I couldn’t imagine life without her.

For a year after we married, everything was like a faerie tale to me. We moved into Henri’s spacious apartment and I quit my high-paying corporate job to take care of Cinderella full-time. Drusilla and Anastasia went to the City’s most prestigious private school and were doing wonderfully. Drusilla, a talented dancer, was a junior member of an elite ballet company and Anastasia was seriously studying the cello. Henri worked long hours to pay for all of this but spent the rest of his time with us and seemed so happy. I took Cinderella to music and movement classes, story-time at the library and to the park every week. On vacations, the whole family went skiing and, once, to Disney World. Everything seemed perfect…until that day.

One day, four-year-old Cinderella felt ill at her music and movement class. Anastasia was going home with a friend after her cello lesson that day, so I decided to head home and let Cinderella get some rest. We let ourselves in the apartment quietly, I guess, because when I carried Cinderella into my bedroom to lay her down for a nap on the big bed, no one had heard us come in. Henri’s naked body was straining on top of my thirteen-year-old daughter, who lay, also naked, staring at the ceiling. I was stunned for a moment as I saw him grunting and moaning as he thrust himself in her and then I screamed, they jumped up, and everything went black. When I came to myself a second later, he was running out the door and Drusilla was screaming and crying hysterically. A strange calm came over me as I called 9-1-1. I requested the police and a crisis team. I knew we would need it.

Henri went to prison and we all went into counseling. He had been raping Drusilla for four months and had told her that if she told, we would never see Cinderella again. Eleven-year-old Anastasia had not been touched but she had known. I hadn’t known. I went back to work, but could not get as good a job as I had before…the corporate world waits for no mommy. We moved into a cheaper apartment, the girls were sent to public school and they had to give up their lessons. Cinderella spent her days at a daycare center that did not have the time or staff to pay attention to her to the degree that she was accustomed. Drusilla was pregnant.

I tried to convince my daughter to have an abortion. I didn’t really believe in abortion, but could not see how any other alternative could be remotely bearable. Drusilla refused. She isolated herself throughout the pregnancy, only leaving the apartment for school and counseling. She was pale and fragile. I waited on her every second that I could, fixed her favorite meals and held her. We saw the counselor twice a week as a family and Drusilla went almost every day. She was quiet and sad, but somehow resolute. She gave birth to a baby boy who had my eyes and hers, a soft chocolate brown, seven months after that terrible day. He had Henri’s jaw, Cinderella’s golden curls. When I looked at him, I felt something, but I didn’t know if it was love or hate. Drusilla didn’t look. Fourteen-years-old, she gave him up for adoption and told me that it was over. I knew it would never be over.

Drusilla tried to be strong and I tried to be there for her. Anastasia tried to be both. Cinderella was heartbroken over the loss of her father and cried for him every day. We couldn’t tell a four-year-old that her father was evil so I told her he was very sick and would have to be away forever, getting well. My girls were so good…they said nothing to hurt her in those early years. She never stopped, though. No matter how much therapy we got or how hard I worked to be a good mother to her, Cinderella’s loss never diminished. Perhaps losing two parents in her short life was more grief than she was made for, perhaps the wickedness of her father left a sense of wrong that she could not tame. Whatever it was, she never stopped complaining. When she was seven, the therapist said we had to tell her the truth, so I did.

Six years of mothering and sistering disappeared in the blink of an eye as Cinderella blamed us. Drusilla had worked hard not to blame her baby sister for what had happened and she had never been unkind to Cinderella but Cinderella blasted her with hatred as soon she knew that Henri had gone to prison for what he had done to Drusilla. It was her fault, our fault that her father, her precious father, was gone. She railed mercilessly at us at every opportunity, the years of affection just gone like they had never happened. She was harshest to Drusilla, who had suffered so much for her. One Saturday when the older girls were with friends, I went to look for eight-year-old Cinderella to feed her lunch and found her in Drusilla and Anastasia’s room. I don’t even know where she could have gotten hold of a can of spray paint, but she had spray-painted the words “slut� and “whore� all over the walls. I don’t even know how she learned those words. That was the first day in over five years that I did not feel like her real mother.

These behaviors continued, in spite of the ongoing therapy in which we were all still enrolled. I tried to get Cinderella hospitalized, but she charmed the therapist into thinking that her sisters and I were exaggerating. The therapist started thinking that we blamed Cinderella for what had happened rather than the other way around. It was like some horrible episode of The Twilight Zone. We kept telling the truth, but no one who could help us could hear it. Cinderella was still as beautiful and charming as she had always been on the surface and she seemed to almost bewitch people into believing whatever she said. It was not long before the therapist and everyone at Cinderella’s school thought that we treated her like a servant and had somehow driven her father away. It was incredible.

Drusilla could not bear to be around Cinderella. I don’t know how she stood it for as long as she did. When she eighteen, she got some Pell grants and loans and, working full-time as well, Drusilla went to a local college, living in the dorms. She never came home and didn’t like me to visit her. She wanted to forget everything, even me. Our team of three was forever sundered. I wanted to get it back, but I couldn’t because I was tied to my responsibility to care for Cinderella like an anchor. I missed Drusilla so much, but I knew she had suffered enough. If she felt better without me, she would have that. I had not protected her and I didn’t deserve her. I deserved the suffering.

Anastasia had somehow managed to keep up with her music throughout the tragedy that was our life. She received a scholarship to Julliard for the cello and never looked back. She became an accomplished cellist and when she was older, I would go to all of her concerts and listen, though she never invited me. She sent me dutiful e-mails about her life and visited me on Mother’s Day and Christmas and my birthday, still trying to be there for everyone. I asked her sometimes if she talked to Drusilla and she would not answer me.

When Anastasia left for school, the word twisted into something strange and unrecognizable. Our family had lived in a nightmare for seven years by that time, but I had kept myself together. I had made bad choices that had ruined my daughters’ lives and knew that I had to work hard to rebuild for them a world in which happiness was possible. Ultimately, it turned out that happiness was only possible for them in a world without the past that I was a part of…and a world without Cinderella. Left behind, I had no more responsibilities to keep me sane. I had only eleven-year-old Cinderella and when I looked in her eyes, I saw quicksand in which I knew I would drown. It was my destiny.

I lived in the quicksand for ten more years. I worked to provide for Cinderella. I continued to reach out to her, hoping that I might one day break through her hatred and be the mother she needed. My efforts became more half-hearted as the years went by. Half a heart was all I really had left and it was hard to love someone who hated you so fiercely. After a while, a doomed sort of duty was all I felt towards golden Cinderella…sometimes less. Unlike my own daughters, Cinderella did not leave me when she turned eighteen. She stayed and went to school in our city, filling each of my days with her hatred. I did not ask her to move on.

When Cinderella was almost twenty-one, we received a strange invitation. Some relatives of her mother’s were having a family reunion. They had not offered to be involved with Cinderella after her mother had died or after Henri went to prison, but they suddenly wanted to see her again. They said her maternal grandparents were near the end of their lives and that they wanted to see her one last time. They were having a fancy cotillion for about two hundred relatives from all over the country.

Cinderella was excited in a way I had not seen since she was four years old. She could not wait to go. I felt as much offense as my consistent depression could muster but knew that I could not stand in her way. I did insist that I accompany her…we really didn’t know these people at all.

Cinderella was swept into a whirl of activity as soon as we arrived. Her family seemed to embrace her like some long-lost heiress who must be courted and cosseted. Cinderella did tend to have that effect on people but she usually had to open her mouth to activate it. Her family gave her no such time to speak. They never stopped chattering excitedly even once and herded her around to all manner of festivities. I was mostly ignored, which suited me fine. I did notice that one woman, who introduced herself to me as Ellen, seemed to be watching me every time I looked up.

I was sharing a hotel room with Cinderella but she was rarely in it. She had quite a social life that week, in a town she had never visited, with a family she had never known. She did wait upon her grandparents enough to charm them, but mostly she was partying with the other young people. Cinderella was, of course, the life of any party. I made no attempt to hem her in or stay near her, as I knew she would not listen to me or care what I thought. She would do as she wished and I would try to make sure se was all right; that was all.

A package was delivered to our room on the day of the cotillion, when she was out with her cousins. It was a beautiful round box, with a note to Cinderella, which I read before she came in to see it: This dress belonged to your mother, who was my very best friend, as well as my cousin twice removed. She wore it at her first cotillion. The shoes are those that she wore when she married your father. I know she would have wanted you to have them. I hope you enjoy them. Love from your Godmother, Ellen. The dress was exquisite and the shoes were like glass.

I accompanied Cinderella to the dance, although she pretended I was not there. She was a vision, but I felt no pride…just the measured detachment that I cultivated as best as I could. Ignored by all except the silently watchful Ellen, I stuck to the sidelines and watched Cinderella dazzle the room. Before long, it was clear to me that Cinderella danced mainly with one boy. I do mean boy because he was much her junior though just about of age, perhaps seventeen. Young though he was, he was a marvelous dancer and seemed very attentive to Cinderella, not minding at all that she was older as far as I could tell. I heard someone whispering about Ellen’s boy and realized that they meant the young man dancing with Cinderella. If he was Ellen’s son, that made him Cinderella’s cousin, but at least three times removed. Perhaps even four…cousin relationships that cross generations are always so confusing. At any rate, he was related distantly enough not to worry over the fact tat they danced more closely and cozily as the night wore on.

At around midnight, I saw Cinderella go rushing past me out of the dance hall. She didn’t stop to tell me that she wanted to go home…she just went, but I caught up with her in the lobby.

“What’s wrong, Cinderella? Did something happen?� I asked.

“I ripped the dress! It’s ruined!� she sobbed. It was then that I noticed the long tear in the dress and realized what she had probably been trying to do when the dress had foiled her…her mother’s dress.

“That’s all right,� I told her. “I’ll have it mended and it will be good as new. Do you want to wear something else and go back?�

“No, no,� she said, sobbing over the loss of the dress or her mother or any combination of a million losses, I could not say. “I want to go to bed.�

“Let’s go, then,� I said, heading towards her room.

“Wait!� she shrieked. “Wait!�

“What is it, now?� I asked, growing weary of trying to comfort her.

“I lost my shoe!� she shrilled. “I want my shoe!�

“I know you want it, Cinderella; of course you do. Don’t worry. Go back to our room and sleep until you feel better. I will find your shoe.�

Cinderella nodded and left without thanking me. I turned back toward the dance hall. Ellen’s boy was at the door and had apparently been watching us as we talked. As I got closer, I could see that he held Cinderella’s shoe in his hands, waiting for me. It wasn’t until I was close enough to reach out to take the shoe from his hand that I looked into his eyes. I stopped.

He looked at me with a look of longing for Cinderella, a look of frustration and lust and hope. He held out the shoe and looked at me. I looked at him and stepped back.

I suddenly understand the wickedness that dwelt in Cinderella’s heart, twisted up in knots with her pain, in a way so much more personal that my dutiful care of her had lately been. I had not felt so close to her since she was a small child, perhaps not even then. I felt one with her now. I felt what she felt…the hatred. I felt it and knew that it would be my last gift to her and the end of whom I had been.

The words could barely make it through the quicksand in my mouth, but they did. They did. “You keep it,� I said. “Give it to her tomorrow.�

He looked confused for a moment, but then the smile that lit his face shone straight through his warm, chocolate brown eyes. I left. The quicksand closed over my head and I found a new life beneath it where I had thought I could never go. I did not tell Cinderella I was leaving, did not return to our sad apartment, nothing…I became someone else without those feelings and obligations. I never saw Cinderella again.