Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

I had not known she was this brave.

It is one thing to survive a cage.

It is another to sit in a bright room full of strangers and describe it, in daylight, while the man who built it stares at you from across the floor.

I had to look away, at moments, watching her do it — not from her, never from her, but from the effort it plainly cost her, which was written in the white of her knuckles and the care with which she made each word come out steady.

Because I understood, watching, that she was doing two things at once, and the second was harder than the first.