I lay awake fearing it.

And what I learned, slowly, over the rockets and the model kits and the ten thousand ordinary afternoons, is that a child’s trust is not repaired by grand gestures or by explanations or by anything you say.

It is repaired by presence — by the simple, relentless, unremarkable fact of an adult who keeps showing up, who is there in the morning and there at night, who does what they say they will do, over and over, until the child’s nervous system slowly relearns the thing that was broken: that some people stay.

I could not undo what Luca had done.