What a very young child remembers is not events but atmospheres — not my grandmother hit me on such a day but the deeper, wordless, bodily knowledge of whether the world is safe.

A child treated with cruelty in her earliest years does not grow up recalling the specific cruelties; she grows up with a nervous system calibrated to danger, a baseline expectation that the people who are supposed to love her may hurt her, a readiness to make herself small and watchful and good in order to avoid a blow she cannot predict.

That is what Wendy had been installing in my daughter, cruelty by cruelty, criticism by criticism, over the whole of her short life — not memories, but a setting, a default assumption about what home is.

And that is the thing I watched fade over those six months, the thing more important than the mark on her cheek: the setting resetting.