I have spent every day since trying, patiently, to teach her the opposite lesson, and the only way to teach it is by never leaving, by being there in the morning and there at night and there for the fever and the tower and the scraped knee, again and again, until the old lesson is worn away and replaced by a new and truer one: that she is held, that she is home, that this time the hands that took her are not going to let go.

That is the whole of my work now.

It is the most important thing I will ever do, and I nearly drove past it to write a check.

Chapter 21 — The Sunlit House

Six months later, the morning sun poured through the wide windows of a house in the Austin suburbs that no longer felt, as my houses always had before, quiet and empty.

It felt full.