There was one setback in the second year that I want to include, because the recovery accounts always run in a straight line and mine did not.

In the November after she turned five, Daisy’s preschool did a thing where the children brought in an object from home for a show-and-tell shelf, and a boy’s toy went missing off it.

It turned up in a coat pocket the following morning.

It had been there for eleven hours.

In those eleven hours, a twenty-four-year-old assistant — who had done nothing wrong, who was doing exactly what she had been taught — stood in front of eleven four- and five-year-olds and said, kindly, “Okay, everybody, nobody’s in trouble, but we need to find Marcus’s dinosaur, so I want everybody to check their bags.”

Daisy wet herself and could not speak for the rest of the day.