I have thought since about how much training it takes to produce that silence in a small child.

Five-year-olds are not quiet.

They narrate everything; they cry at small hurts and large ones; a child that age standing at a sink she is too little to reach, tired and sore, should have been complaining loudly to anyone who would listen.

That is the natural state of a five-year-old, and it is a good state, a healthy one, the sound of a child who has never had a reason to believe that her distress would cost her something.

My daughter had been schooled out of it.

Somewhere in the year I wasn’t watching, Elodie had learned the specific, awful lesson that noise brought consequences — not to her, I would come to understand, but to her mother, which for a child who loves her mother is worse.