A person does not walk out of that and simply resume.

The fear does not evaporate when the door opens; it has to be unlearned, slowly, in a body that spent months braced.

So we chose a house with long views and no locks on the inside doors, and I watched my daughter relearn, week by week, the things that had been taken from her — that she could leave a room without asking, that her account of her own life was true, that a knock at the door was not a threat.

Some of it came back fast.

Some of it is still coming back.

There were nights, early on, when she woke needing to hear my voice, and I learned not to reach for her in the dark until she reached first, the way you learn a new grammar of touch with someone who has been hurt.