Six months later, the afternoon sun streamed through the wide windows of our new home — a place that was fully ours, filled with fresh flowers and school art projects and the ordinary happy noise of four children playing together.

I sat on the sofa, watching Kelly help her younger brother build a Lego tower on the rug.

And I noticed, watching her, the thing I had been working toward for months without quite letting myself hope for it: that the weight was gone from her.

The careful, watchful heaviness she had carried for so long, the burden of a child who believed she had to protect her mother — it had lifted.

She helped her brother with his tower, and she laughed when it fell, and she argued with him about which color went next, and she was, in every visible way, just a little girl, absorbed in a little girl’s afternoon.