Someone had reached into her daughter and taken that, deliberately, and had used the girl’s own love for her family as the tool to do it.

Before Martha did anything else, before she said one word to her husband, she was going to begin the long work of putting it back.

She thought, holding her daughter, about how a thing like this actually gets done to a child — not in one dramatic stroke, but by patient repetition, the way water shapes stone.

No one had sat Irene down and told her, once and cruelly, that her pain did not matter.

It had been taught to her the way all the deepest lessons are taught, in a thousand small moments, each too minor to protest: a sigh when she said her stomach hurt, a joke about how she was always coming down with something, a look exchanged over her head between adults, a gentle correction that maybe she was just tired, just anxious, just looking for a reason to get out of school.