To believe that the wrongness she felt was not real, or not important, or evidence of being bad rather than being harmed.

That is the machinery by which a child is made unable to protect herself: you sever her from her own instincts, you teach her that her internal alarms are the thing to be ashamed of, until she cannot tell danger from discipline and reaches for her mother’s interpretation of her own experience instead of her own.

It is why Mira never told.

It is why, on her first night with me, she asked where to get her dose like a good girl checking a rule.

Sondra had not only harmed her daughter’s body.

She had reached inside and tried to break the instrument a person uses to know when they are being hurt — and the whole long work ahead of us, I understood, would be teaching Mira to trust that instrument again.