Children are more resilient than we have any right to expect and more perceptive than we like to admit, and she had plainly carried, in her small body, more of the old tension than I had realized.

In the new house she slept better.

She laughed more.

The careful, watchful look I’d seen on her face that afternoon on the beach did not return.

She asked about her father a handful of times, in the plain way of children, and I answered her honestly and at the size she could hold — that Daddy had done some things that were against the rules, serious things, and that he had to be away for a long time because of them, and that none of it, not one speck of it, was her fault or had anything to do with how much she was loved.

“I’m not in trouble for telling you?” she asked once, her old worry surfacing for just a moment.