The person it happened to ends up managing everybody else’s reaction to it.

My sister needed to do something.

My mother needed to be reassured.

My father needed to not discuss it.

A colleague at school, once she knew, needed to check on me every single day for about six weeks, which was meant entirely kindly and which I eventually had to ask her to stop.

Every one of those is a person responding to a terrible thing with love, and every one of those landed on me, and there were about four months in the second year where I spent more energy on other people’s feelings about what had happened to me than on what had happened to me.

Vesna and I had it out in the February, in her kitchen in Eau Claire, and it is the only real fight we have had as adults.