And so the healing had to be repetition also, in the other direction: not one grand conversation in which I fixed everything, but ten thousand ordinary moments in which the new truth was shown.

Leo cries; Dad comes; Lily watches and slowly relaxes.

Lily has a need; Dad meets it without a flicker of annoyance; Lily’s nervous system files away, one more time, that her needs are welcome here.

It is slow, and it is unglamorous, and there is no dramatic breakthrough, no single afternoon where the old lesson is gone and the new one is installed.

There is only the patient, repeated, loving accumulation of evidence, offered day after day, until the child’s body finally believes what her father keeps showing her.