No one had spent years telling her that what she saw was not what she saw, that her certainty was a defect, that the loving thing to do was to override her own alarm for the comfort of the people upsetting her.

All of that machinery, the conditioning that had been built into me so completely that I all but let it cost my son his life, had not yet been installed in her.

She saw a wrong thing, and she called it a wrong thing, and she acted — with no doubt, no second-guessing, no anxious rehearsal of how she might be overreacting.

I used to think of a child’s certainty as a kind of innocence, something charming that the world would eventually and rightly sand away.