I watched her stop checking my face.

I watched her become, by degrees, careless in the way children are supposed to be careless — trusting that the ground beneath her would hold, because someone else was holding it.

That was the victory that mattered.

Not the ruined wedding.

The nine-year-old, learning to be nine again.

I have kept a particular image from those recovery months, and I return to it when I want to remember what actually matters, because it is so small that it would be invisible to anyone who did not know what it meant.

It is the image of Kelly, one ordinary afternoon, several months in, throwing a genuine tantrum — a real, unreasonable, foot-stomping, deeply childish fit about something that did not matter at all, some small denied want, a screen turned off too soon or a snack refused before dinner.