It is the kind of clean, reasonable-sounding language that cruelty wears when it wants to pass for good sense.

I have noticed, since, how often real harm hides inside reasonable-sounding words, how the people who do the worst things are so rarely cackling villains and so often calm, articulate adults explaining, patiently, why the terrible thing was actually the sensible thing.

Emotional confusion.

Personal space.

Preliminary ideas.

Mature conversation.

These are the phrases Brenda reached for that day, and every one of them is a perfectly innocent phrase, and every one of them was being used, in that moment, to paper over the fact that she had locked a grieving child on a cold floor.

I think this is worth naming for anyone who might one day find themselves across from it, because it is disorienting in the moment.