It was not sudden and it was not total; trauma doesn’t work that way, and there were hard days still, setbacks and nightmares and moments when the old fear rose up out of nowhere.

But there were more good days now than hard ones, and the good days started to outnumber the bad by a wider margin every week.

Daisy stopped hiding food.

One day I simply found no crackers under her pillow, and none the next day, and I realized she had finally, somewhere in her small body, come to believe that dinner would come again tomorrow, because it always had.

Mason began, for the first time in his life, to eat his own dinner while Daisy ate hers, instead of standing watch over her plate — a small thing that undid me completely the first time I noticed it, because it meant he had finally let himself believe that keeping his sister alive was no longer his job alone.