The horror faded like a fever breaking, and underneath it, whole and warm, was simply a little girl who missed her mom.

I have come to think about her sensitivity differently now than I used to.

For years I treated it as a curiosity, almost an embarrassment — the thing that made strangers uncomfortable, that I explained away with a laugh at dinner parties.

After that morning in the chapel I saw it as a wound, a terrible burden laid on a child too small to carry it.

But neither of those is right, and I have finally landed somewhere truer.