Think of what it took to compose it.

My daughter, hurt and frightened in the dark, had to find words a three-year-old could remember and repeat under pressure, in a crowded hotel, to a grandfather who might not listen — and the words she chose were if she goes to sleep for a really long time. She could not say to her baby if I am killed. No mother could.

So she translated her own possible death into the gentlest thing a small child could hold, a long sleep, and she made him practice it, and she trusted him with it, because I had left her no one else to trust.

That is the measure of how far I had failed her.