She was asking out of habit.

To Mira, being given something before sleep was simply what bedtime was, a step as ordinary and expected as brushing teeth, a thing that happened to children in the evening because that was how the world worked.

She had no idea it was a violation.

She had no framework in which to be outraged by it, because it was all she had ever known, and a child cannot be horrified by the water she swims in.

That was the cruelest part of what Sondra had built — not just the harm, but the normalcy of the harm, the way she had made it seamless, unquestioned, part of the furniture of a childhood, so that her daughter would carry it forward without ever knowing there was anything to escape from.

And here was Mira, standing in my entryway on her first night of freedom, politely asking where we kept the thing that had been poisoning her, so she could take her dose and be a good girl and go to bed.