And I held that steering wheel in the parking lot and understood that my only job now — the only thing that mattered in the entire world — was to make sure my daughter never had one more day of learning to believe that being hurt was her fault.

Grandma mad. Two words, from a two-year-old, and they contained the whole of the damage and the whole of my mission in undoing it.

Because notice what my daughter did not say.

She did not say Grandma bad. She did not say Grandma hurt me. She said Grandma mad — which is to say, she reached, in her tiny developing mind, for an explanation, and the explanation she reached for placed the cause not in her grandmother’s cruelty but in some failing of her own that had made Grandma mad.

This is what abuse does to a child, and it does it fastest and deepest to the youngest ones: it teaches them that they are the reason.