The crisis, for all it took, gave that back.

We are closer now than we have been since childhood, bound by the particular closeness of people who have stood together in a fire and walked out the other side.

I thought often, in those months, about how close it had come.

One more day of my not noticing.

One more successful breakfast of papers signed.

A daughter a little less brave, or a mother a little less willing to listen when a child says her tummy feels bad.

The whole thing had turned on the thinnest of hinges, and the hinge had been a five-year-old’s trust that she could tell her mother anything.