When I lay down outside their door with the light on, I was saying, without words: someone is awake.

Someone is on watch.

You can sleep, because I am doing the watching now. For three years, I realized, Mason had never fully slept.

Not really.

Some part of a child who is the only guardian of a smaller child never gets to power all the way down; it stays up, listening, ready, because if it doesn’t, who will?

He had been standing sentry over Daisy through every night of the worst three years of his life, and no six-year-old body is built to hold that post.

So the most important thing I did in those early weeks was not the beds or the toys or even the food.