I assumed we would tear it down.

Hannah decided otherwise.

“We can tear it down,” I offered her one afternoon.

“No,” she said.

“You want to keep it?”

“I want it,” she said, with a clarity that stopped my breath, “to stop being scary.” And so we did not tear it down.

We rebuilt it — into a clean, bright barn for four rescue farm animals, because Hannah insisted, with a wisdom I am still learning from, that the animals had never been responsible for what happened there.

And beside that barn, we opened a small animal-assisted therapy center for children going through trauma of their own.