I had bought an old house there, a weathered historic place overlooking the open Atlantic, and we had spent a whole year making it ours.

Out on the wide wooden porch, my thirteen-year-old sons sat at a picnic table we had built together over the summer — arguing cheerfully over the rules of a board game, our rescue golden retriever stretched out asleep in a patch of afternoon sun beside them.

I came out with a tray of warm drinks, and they looked up, and their faces were healthy and bright and, most of all, unafraid.

I will not tell you the healing was quick or clean, because that would be its own kind of lie, and we have had enough lies.