This is the part that makes me the angriest of anything in this entire story.
He didn’t threaten to hurt her. He never laid a hand on that child — I want that stated plainly, because the internet version has made him into something he isn’t, and because it matters to Emma that the record be right.
What he did was sit her down and explain, calmly, that if she said one word to her grandfather, she’d be sent to a boarding school three hours away. That I was old. That I’d be upset and it might be bad for my heart, like it had been for her grandmother’s. That her mother would get in trouble and go away forever and it would be Emma’s fault for telling.
He put the whole thing on a seven-year-old and told her it was her fault if it broke.
