A child in that state does not need your cheerfulness; your cheerfulness only teaches him that his real feelings are unwelcome, that he must perform okayness to keep you comfortable.

What he needs is for you to be unafraid of his darkness, to sit near it without flinching, to let him know by your steadiness that there is no mood of his large enough to drive you off.

I had simply, somewhere in those months, stopped waiting for him to be anything other than what he was.

He was Silas.

He was dryly funny and almost unbearably observant and compulsively helpful and privately frightened, and he was, as of a brief and almost anticlimactic hearing in a county courtroom, legally and permanently my son.