Safety is where healing can begin.

The healing itself is a long, patient, unglamorous work, and my daughter did every bit of it, and I want her to be honored for it.

Because for a long time after we moved to Oregon, the ordinary sounds of a peaceful house — a piano in the next room, a child laughing on the phone, the hum of an oven warming for dinner — were not ordinary to us at all.

They were hard-won territory, reclaimed inch by inch.