And then I said it on the nights after that, and the nights after those, however many it took, because that was the promise I had made her on the shoulder of a foggy road eighteen months before, and I intended to keep it with my whole life.

Slowly — month by month, with the help of a gifted pediatric trauma specialist and the fierce, uncomplicated love of her two older sisters — the shadows began to loosen their grip on my youngest daughter.

The dark rooms stopped being a threat.

The nightmares came less often, and then rarely, and then they became something that had happened once, long ago, to a smaller version of herself.

She learned, slowly, that a closed door in our house was only a way to keep the cold night air out, and never, ever a way to keep her trapped inside.