The distrust of anything they hadn’t watched me pour was, the doctors told me, its own kind of wound — the body’s memory outlasting the mind’s, a vigilance burned in so deep it had stopped being a thought and become a reflex.

Rhys would pick up a bottle and turn it in his hands, checking the seal, before he could drink from it, and he did it without seeming to notice he was doing it.

Mira would appear silently in the kitchen doorway whenever she heard me open the refrigerator, and stand there, and watch, until she’d seen the carton opened and the juice poured, and only then relax and drift away.

The smell of fruit punch would make Rhys leave a room.

I did not fight any of it.

I understood that these were not irrational fears to be corrected but rational adaptations to a world that had, for both of them, actually been dangerous — that their bodies had learned a true thing, that a drink could hurt you, and that unlearning it would take exactly as long as it took, and could not be rushed by reassurance.