“Daddy said,” she told me, in a small voice, “I shouldn’t bother grown-ups.” I held her, and I promised her, silently, that she would never again be made to feel that she was a bother, that her needs were an inconvenience, that she should stay quiet and small and hungry rather than trouble anyone.

Never again.

Whatever it took.

That sentence she said, Daddy said I shouldn’t bother grown-ups, has stayed with me longer than almost anything else from that terrible day, because of what it revealed about the small, careful, self-erasing survival my daughter had been taught in my absence.

A five-year-old, alone and hungry and frightened, and the lesson she had absorbed so deeply that she offered it up to me even in the moment of rescue, was that her hunger was a nuisance, that her fear was an imposition, that the correct response to being abandoned was to make herself as small and silent and undemanding as possible so as not to trouble the adults who had abandoned her.

Think about what it takes to teach a child that.