Leo learned to trust again not because I explained his father to him, but because I was, for a thousand days running, simply and unfailingly there.

The rocket on the porch was the beginning of it: the sky, brought down to a place he could touch, in the hands of a person who would not leave.

Everything after — the ground school, the flight jacket, the boy who holds his own sky steady — grew from that.

You cannot talk a child back into trust.

You can only earn it, one kept promise at a time, until they are ready to fly again on their own.

Chapter 16 — Freed From a Lie