Behind me, Tristan laughed. “See, Dad? She’s doing theater. Just like Charlotte.”

I have gone over that moment more times than any other from those five years, and it is the one I cannot forgive, the one that finally made forgiveness beside the point.

Because a child does not arrive at an impulse like that on her own.

A four-year-old does not decide, out of nowhere, that eating a bite of food is a crime she must physically undo.

She learns it — the way children learn everything, by watching what happens in the room around them, over and over, until the lesson goes down into the bones.