When he hesitated at the door, it was his cousin who knew exactly what to say, because she was the only other person in the world who knew exactly what he was afraid of. We can leave the second either of us wants. She gave him the thing she herself had never had until she came to us: an exit, guaranteed in advance, a promise that his fear would be honored instead of overruled.

The two of them had become, over those months, something I don’t have a clean word for — cousins, and then siblings, but also fellow survivors, two children who had been through the same specific darkness and who understood each other in a way no adult, however loving, ever fully could.

I could comfort them.

Only they could truly recognize each other.

And watching Mira coax Rhys to the park by promising him the one thing that made it bearable, I understood that in saving each other’s lives that terrible afternoon, they had also, without meaning to, given each other something that would last: a person who had been there, who knew, who would never need it explained.

They would grow up with that.