The therapist told me early on not to rush her, not to promise her the fear would vanish, but to build her a world so reliable that the fear slowly runs out of evidence.

So that is what I am doing.

I come home early, every day, and she can hear the truck, and I have never once not come.

I leave the doors open unless she says otherwise.

I answer every question about her mother truthfully and at whatever size she can hold that year.

I am building her, one ordinary safe evening at a time, the thing her mother died trying to give her: a house where a child does not have to sleep in her shoes.

It is slow.

But she has started leaving them by the door now, at night, the way you do when you have decided you are not going to have to run.

Not long ago she drew three people under a whole sky of sunflowers, and one of them, a woman, wore a bright green scarf, and when I asked who it was she said, “That’s Mommy.

She’s somewhere nobody can ever lock her in.” I had to go out to the porch so she wouldn’t see my face.