Mira had not been a mystery to be solved.

Mira had been the rehearsal.

I could not hold that thought for long without having to set it down, and I still can’t.

That my sister-in-law had looked at my energetic, talkative, joyful boy and seen not a child but a problem to be corrected — and had reached, to correct him, for the exact thing she’d been doing to her own daughter for years, confident it would work because she had practiced it so many times.

The text made it unbearable and undeniable at once: the casual certainty of I already know what works, the way she wrote it the way another person might write that they knew a good shortcut across town.

She had a method, and she trusted it, because she had a test subject at home who had never once been able to say no.