One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

But I do know this: part of our destory is who’s telling it. My mother, she’s telling Bourne’s old story, its should-be story. It’s our turn now, and we must tell the destory, what happened instead, what happens next. Revenge, recrimination, restitution—where you prove it and you sue and you win and that’s why they leave and that’s how you move on—all of that is the old story, and we left that one somewhere along the path, forking off to where we are now, on our secret way in the night. It’s not our mother—our mothers, the last generation—who can fix this. They can’t. It is up to us now, the daughters, to move our town forward, to save us all, to tell a different story. Her way was lawyers and injunctions and lawsuits and the bounds of the system. Ours will be something else because here is a thing we know which Nora does not: sometimes you have to destroy—or destory—something in order to save it.