Excerpt from The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel D. Huber, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And so I smiled and went over to hug her and said something like, "Well, here we are now, and I suppose we must concentrate on what's in front of us." Some such platitude, meant to be comforting. And meant to change the subject. After all, she's a grown woman now, and I did not want to revisit the past. Not that particular past, at any rate, a time when I may have let her down—I will never know, not really—and a time when Francesco and I turned a corner and could not look back.

How easily, in the end, I gave in to him. I try not to think of it. But there it is, it's inevitable. I feel the quick clenching of my stomach, the twinge of guilt running through me even now. It's simply wearying.

The fact is that when Pamela started in on that subject, my first thought was not a comforting platitude at all. The mind goes where it will. I've learned to forgive myself its quirky meanderings. We are all the same, aren't we? The most angelic among us must sometimes have thoughts that are mean or vengeful or idiotic or perverse. Just yesterday I was shopping at Balducci's and came across an elderly couple huddled in the aisle. They were examining the pudding boxes. And what should spring into my mind but a picture of them naked in bed, I even heard the man groaning. Wretched, horrid thought. I went back to hunting down the Colman's.

I do wonder, though, about these thoughts that fly into our minds from God knows where, shocking our decent and amiable selves. I suppose it must be a filtering mechanism of sorts, sanity's system of checks and balances.

At any rate, I confess that my immediate thought when Pamela talked of her childhood ending was, "I'm afraid, my dear, it never really has."


Now here she is, and not a thing I can do.

I hear nothing. The door to her room is shut, there is no sound of movement. She's utterly quiet, as if she's not here at all—yet somehow she fills the apartment so that I feel there is no room for me in this place.

Excerpted from The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel D Huber. Copyright © 2017 by Laurel D Huber. Excerpted by permission of She Writes Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.