The school called me at eleven and I got there in nineteen minutes and she was in the office with a blanket, silent, with both hands flat on her head.

That was eighteen months in.

Eighteen months of therapy and four hundred repetitions and a house with a yellow door, and one entirely reasonable sentence from a kind young woman took the whole thing down in about four seconds.

That was the worst day of the second year and it is the reason I am careful now, when people ask me how she is, not to say “fine.”

I did two things afterward.

I wrote a one-page document — Dr.