On May 26, Hayden Panettiere sat before an audience in Los Angeles to talk about the parts of her life she had put into a book.

Her memoir covered fame, addiction and motherhood. But when the conversation turned to her 11-year-old daughter, Kaya, Panettiere focused on something the child might someday take from those pages.

She wanted to make sure Kaya never looked at her mother’s hardest years and found a reason to blame herself.

Three months later, Panettiere was dead at 36.

The Heroes and Nashville actress died Aug. 16. Her representative confirmed her death in a statement issued on behalf of her father, Alan Panettiere. Authorities were investigating the circumstances, and a preliminary police inquiry found no indication of foul play or suspicious circumstances.

In the months before her death, Panettiere had been speaking with unusual openness about the daughter she shared with former fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, and about what she hoped Kaya would understand when she was old enough to read her mother’s story.

She Had Written Down the Years Kaya Might One Day Read About

Panettiere’s memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, was published May 19.

The book traced a life that included becoming famous at a young age, her struggles with addiction and her experience as a mother. Panettiere had also spoken publicly about a traumatic childbirth, postpartum depression and her decision to sign over custody of Kaya to Klitschko in 2018.

Kaya had been born in December 2014.

As Panettiere sought treatment for alcoholism and substance abuse, Klitschko believed their daughter should live with him in Europe. Panettiere later said the separation was difficult to describe because so many feelings came with it.

The arrangement became one of the most painful subjects in her memoir.

Panettiere wrote that living apart from Kaya had been “the most gut-wrenching experience of my life.” She described sadness, resentment and anger over not sharing a home with her daughter every day.

Still, she said their bond remained “incredibly strong.”

That distinction mattered to her.

There Was One Thought She Didn’t Want Kaya to Carry

At the May book event, hosted by Book Soup at the Harmony Gold Theater, Panettiere spoke about the possibility that Kaya would eventually read the memoir for herself.

Her concern wasn’t simply whether the material would be difficult.

It was what her daughter might think caused it.

“I don’t want her ever to read it and think any of it was her fault,” Panettiere said.

Kaya was only 11, and Panettiere acknowledged that what she had written would be a great deal for a child that age to absorb.

“I love her so dearly,” she said, before adding that she intended to keep protecting her while she was young.

That protection had also shaped what Panettiere said publicly about motherhood.

During an appearance on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, she pushed back on the idea that signing over custody meant she had simply chosen to give her daughter away. Panettiere said those claims “couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

She called herself a “mother lion.”

Panettiere also said she would have “burnt the whole world down” for Kaya.

Distance Didn’t Change How She Described Her Daughter

Panettiere never tried to hide what living apart had cost her.

In the memoir, she wrote about grieving the version of motherhood she had once expected for herself. Raising a child partly through FaceTime wasn’t what she had pictured.

“I grieve that I’m not the mother I thought I’d be,” she wrote.

Yet the same passage moved quickly back to what she felt she still had.

Despite missing Kaya until her “heart aches,” Panettiere wrote that she knew she was fortunate to be her mother. She described the girl as having the best qualities of both parents.

Then came the line that left little doubt about Kaya’s place in her life.

“She is the greatest gift of my life,” Panettiere wrote.

That sentence sat beside the harder admissions rather than replacing them. Panettiere could write about regret, addiction, separation and the mother she wished she had been while also insisting that Kaya remained deeply loved.

By May, she was thinking about how those two parts of the story might look through her daughter’s eyes.

Her Last Public Words About Kaya Were About Protection

Panettiere’s death was announced less than three months after the Los Angeles event.

According to PEOPLE, police and emergency medical personnel responded to a Greenville, South Carolina, home following a report of an unresponsive woman. The Greenville Police Department and Greenville County Coroner’s Office were investigating her death.

Her family asked for privacy as they grieved.

What Panettiere had already put on the record about Kaya now carried a different finality: the mother speaking in May could not know how soon her daughter might be left with those words.

She had written about the pain of not waking up under the same roof as Kaya. She had defended the strength of their bond and called the girl the greatest gift of her life.

But at the book event, Panettiere’s concern was even narrower.

Someday, Kaya might open the memoir and read about what her mother had lived through. Panettiere wanted one message to survive every page that came before and after it.

“I’ll continue protecting her,” she said, “especially while she’s young.”