English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
A: You can't keep me from seeing my daughter.
B: When you and your drinking are hurting her, I can.
A: Yeah, 'cause you've never did anything to hurt her, right? You wanted the divorce. I think that's hurt her more than anything else.
My question is if the line "'cause you've never did anything to hurt her" is completely natural here? Or does it indicate that B divorced A to (deliberately) hurt their daughter?
It's a rhetorical question:
"'Cause you never did anything to hurt her, right?"
The question is quite natural in this context. Now that B has stated that A is hurting the daughter, A is trying to score a point in the argument by implying that B has hurt the daughter by divorcing A. There isn't necessarily an implication that A thinks B deliberately divorced A to hurt the daughter, but A is claiming that that was the effect.
In context, the meaning here is probably
but you must agree that you also did something that did hurt her
You are correct that the words could mean
you did something in order to hurt her
That does not seem a plausible interpretation based on the very short bit of dialogue given. People get divorced for many reasons, but doing so for the purpose of deliberately causing emotional or psychological harm to their children probably is relatively infrequent.
