That’s why we have washing machines.”

She laughed a little too quickly, relieved.

He noticed.

Later he told me he was beginning to understand how much work it took to replace one frightening lesson with hundreds of ordinary safe moments.

I told him I wasn’t counting.

He said he wasn’t either.

But each time Tessa recovered from a mistake without apologizing for existing, we both felt the quiet weight of progress.

The next morning she marched into school with her constellation book and a new question for her science teacher.