It did not come that way at all.

It came in a thousand tiny, almost invisible gestures like the bread on the plate, each one a small experiment in trust that either succeeded or failed, and slowly, over months, mostly succeeded.

Trauma, I learned, is not undone by grand reassurances.

You cannot talk a child out of the certainty that homes vanish; he learned that certainty from years of homes vanishing, and no speech of mine could outweigh his lived experience.

What can outweigh it is only more lived experience, of the opposite kind, accumulated patiently, one ordinary day at a time.