I did not know, standing on that porch, how much that wave would come to mean to me, but I think even then some part of me recognized it for what it was: proof that whatever had been done to him had not managed to reach all the way to the bottom of him, that under the food-hoarding and the door-checking and the terrible watchful calm, there was still a child in there, wanting to be loved, refusing, against all his own hard evidence, to entirely give up on people.

Children are more durable than we fear and more fragile than we know, both at once.

They can survive things that would destroy an adult, and they survive them by becoming, very young, brilliant and exhausted little strategists, spending energy no child should have to spend on the basic work of staying safe.

My son had done that.

He had spent seven years being brilliant and exhausted, solving problems no seven-year-old should face, and it had cost him a childhood.

But it had not cost him the wave.