Rebuilding that — the simple, animal expectation that a cry will be answered — turned out to be the deepest and longest work of all the work we did together.

For months, Hannah cried quietly, if she cried at all, and each time I made a point of coming, immediately, of answering the smallest sound of her distress with my presence, over and over, until slowly her body relearned the thing every child is supposed to be born knowing: that when she is hurt, someone comes.

The first time she cried loudly in front of me — really cried, messily, the unrestrained wail of a child who trusts that she will be held — I nearly wept myself, with relief, because it meant she had begun to believe again that her pain was allowed to make noise, that someone would answer it, that she was, at last, a child who expected to be heard.

It is a strange thing to celebrate a daughter’s loud crying.