You did nothing wrong, and we believe you, and you are safe now, and no one is ever going to do that to you again.” Slowly, over those weeks, the nights got better.

The crying came less often.

He began, by inches, to believe us.

Healing, I learned in those months, is not a straight line, especially the healing of the heart, and especially in a child.

There were good weeks followed by hard ones for no reason we could identify, nights of peace and then a sudden nightmare out of nowhere, progress that seemed solid until it wasn’t.

We learned not to measure it day by day, because day by day it could look like nothing was changing.