He did not sigh at our checking of locks, or grow impatient with Nora’s need to know where I was every second, or take our slowness to trust him as an insult to his kindness.

He simply received our fear, night after night, without condition and without complaint, and let it be what it was: an injury, not a flaw; a thing that had been done to us, not a thing we were doing to him.

That distinction is everything.

A child recovering from terror is exhausting to live with, and there is a kind of well-meaning adult who helps for a while and then, wounded that their kindness has not been rewarded with instant trust, begins to make the child feel that her ongoing fear is an ingratitude.

That adult, however good their intentions, re-injures the child, because they make her healing about their own feelings.