They kept believing that harm was a transaction, that a wrong could be squared with a payment, that the medical bills were the debt and settling them would settle the matter.

And they could not grasp that the thing my son had lost, that night, was not something with a price.

He had lost, for a time, his sense that the world was safe and that adults could be trusted.

No check pays that back.

It comes back, if it comes back at all, only through the slow patient work of being shown otherwise, night after night, month after month, by people who will keep opening the door until he believes in doors again.

That is not a bill anyone can pay.