Instead we hired an old neighbor, Don Callahan, to take it apart, board by board, and we moved the chickens to a good new coop across the yard, and the old pine was cut for firewood, and the ground was scrubbed clean, and over that exact plot of earth Natasha planted lavender and bougainvillea and wildflowers.

“I never want to look out my window and see a prison,” she told me.

“I want to see things growing.” Her recovery was not quick and it was not simple.

There were nights she woke screaming.

There were times a raised voice at the market froze her where she stood.

Sometimes I found her hiding bread in her nightstand, her body still braced against a hunger that was over.

Healing, I learned, does not arrive all at once.