She learned that her mother’s need for peace was larger than her mother’s willingness to hear her.

And so, eventually, she stopped telling me, and began keeping notes instead, addressed to someone who might see her, because she had given up on the one person who should have seen her first.

That word — someone — is the one I cannot get out of my head, even now, even with her safe and singing in the next room.

My daughter, planning for the next time she would be shut out into the cold, did not write until Mom comes. She wrote until someone sees me. She had downgraded me, in her private accounting, from her mother to a member of the general public — from the person who was supposed to be watching, specifically, for her, to just one more stranger who might happen to glance her way.

And she had done it because I taught her to.

Not on purpose, never on purpose, but a child does not distinguish between the cruelty done on purpose and the abandonment done by good intentions; both of them just feel, from the inside, like being alone.