Modern Love The Podcast is supported by

Produced by the ILAB at WBUR Boston.

From The New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, Loss and Redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chakrabardi.

Love is about trust.

But have you ever been tempted to breach that trust?

To read someone's diary, check their text messages, read their emails?

Joyce Maynard writes about a time when she faced that temptation.

Her essay is called, My Secret Left Me Unable to Help.

It's read by Jesselin Gilsig, who has appeared on shows including Glee, Nip Tuck and Vikings.

As hard as it was, sometimes caring for my children when they were little.

Back in those days, I at least stood a reasonable chance of protecting my son's and daughter from pain and loss.

The hard part hits later when fiercely as you love this person and desperately as you may worry,

you can't come to your child's rescue.

Worse, what you imagined you were doing to protect her, may actually end up inflicting another form of injury,

as my actions easily could have in what happened between my daughter and me.

It was the fall of 2001, and the world felt like a particularly dangerous place.

My children were grown and out on their own, one son at college, the other bumming around West Africa.

At 22, my daughter Audrey had left to spend six months volunteering with a women's organization in a poor town in the Dominican Republic.

Not long after Audrey started living in Badaona, she emailed that she had met a young man,

Johnny, who ran a kind of taxi service offering rides on the back of his motorcycle, he had given her a lift.

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