My children’s memory, and my own survival, would be woven into a tool that reached back into the darkness to pull other people out of it.

There is no better use I could imagine for what I had been through.

Because this, in the end, was the answer I found to the question that haunts every survivor of a great harm: what do you do with it?

What do you do with the fact of what happened to you, with the scar tissue and the memory and the wound that never fully closes?

There are, I think, really only two options, and everything depends on which one you choose.