I lay awake wondering whether I had it in me — whether a woman already hollowed out by her own grief had enough left to meet a child’s.

But I kept going to the sessions.

I kept filling out the forms.

Because underneath the fear was something I had not felt in three years, a small forward-leaning thing I slowly recognized as purpose, and I was not willing to let it go.

I think the training saved us, in the end, as much as any love did.

If I had come to Silas with only my grief and my good intentions, I would have made every mistake the sessions warned me against — I would have been hurt by his coldness, confused by his testing, quick to read his silences as rejection and slow to see the frightened logic underneath them.

The sessions taught me to be patient with a slowness that had nothing to do with me, to not take a traumatized child’s self-protection personally.