Children are very confused when parents say one thing, but their behavior says something different. Growing up in such a home, children choose to believe the words or the behaviour.

Sounds like your younger daughters believed the behaviour and wasn't surprised or hurt by the divorce.

However, it sounds like your older daughter believed the words. If so, she might feel you betrayed her trust and now considers you manipulative, deceitful and un-trustworthy as a grandmother.

Right now, you clearly need a lot of support and validation. Luckily, you are getting a whole lot of both from your family and even more, here in the comments on Medium.

In time, your current need will fade and you will find yourself ready to, or forced to confront the hard stuff. For that reason, I encourage you not to make things harder on yourself. Be careful what you say, especially to yourself. Give yourself some wiggle room when you make statements. For example, I re-wrote your opening sentence thusly.

"Realizing I no longer loved my daughter, but did not care was so unlike me, I couldn't make sense of it." Can you see how this is an in-progress feeling, not a blanket, have to live up to it forever statement?

Another example. You describe your marriage one way, but later you write: "I didn’t tell her how abusive her father had been to me..." Your word "abusive" was a huge surprise, because it did not fit with what you wrote earlier in the story.

I am merely and hopefully, trying to help you see why your daughter might be confused by you. Rather than emotional abuse, it sounds like your husband was incapable of meeting your emotional needs. If so, your daughter might feel lost, even frightened of your emotional needs. If her father wasn't able to show her how to meet your emotional needs, she might feel she can't either. Your emotional needs may exceed her ability to meet them as well.

That said, you seem oddly attached to your ex-husband's emotional support and understanding now. For that reason, you might try putting yourself in your daughter's shoes and remembering life in your home while she was growing up. How might she have seen things? How did she see you? How did she see her father? How did she see her sister? Did things look different through her eyes?

My daughters and I have discussed these questions many times. And oh my gosh, I had no idea they were seeing and hearing things so differently than I did, or intended or expected, or assumed. \

In case you miss my point, let me be blunt. When you say you do not love your daughter and you do not care - I do NOT believe you. I spent my time and words and care to warn you away from making it impossible to take it back.