I watched my daughter’s baseline shift, slowly, from wariness to ease, from bracing to trust, from the watchful goodness of a child who expects to be judged to the loud carelessness of a child who expects to be loved.

She will not remember the cruelty.

But she would have carried its setting for the rest of her life, if I had left her in it — and the reason I did everything I did, the report, the courtroom, the refused settlement, all of it, was to change the setting while it could still be changed, before the wariness became her permanent architecture instead of a phase she got to grow out of.

She smashed a strawberry, unafraid.