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

It comes the way flowers come over a scrubbed patch of ground — slowly, and then everywhere.

I think often about the choice Natasha made at that gate — to stay, rather than run — because it taught me something about recovery I would never have understood otherwise.

The easy story, the one people expect, is that a survivor should get as far from the site of her suffering as she possibly can, put an ocean between herself and it, never look back.

And for some people that is right, and I would never argue with a woman who needed to go.