My job, I came to understand, was simply to keep being a safe place for the next piece to land, to receive each one without the explosion of anger she still half expected, so that she would trust me with the piece after it.

It was slow.

It was, in its own way, harder than any confrontation, because it required me to sit still and absorb, week after week, the growing picture of what my daughter had endured, and to keep my own fury folded quietly away so that it never became one more thing she had to manage.

But it was the only way.

A child unspools the truth at her own pace, or not at all, and the best a parent can do is be the steady hands that never flinch as it comes.