A few weeks later she said it out loud.

By the end of the month she stood in our living room with her hands on her hips and announced, “I’m allowed to move my feet if I’m not safe.”

Daniel was doing his own excavation. He started counseling, and the defenses he’d built around his mother’s image began coming down, exposing what was underneath.

Old stories surfaced like splinters: being locked in a dark basement for questioning a curfew, being left in a church pew because his allergies were “causing a scene,” being mocked for being afraid.

“I told myself that was just a normal childhood,” he said one evening.

We were on the back patio in the humid summer air, jasmine somewhere in the dark.