But measured across the months, the direction was unmistakable.

The boy who had woken screaming that he had not taken it gradually became a boy who slept through the night.

The child who had flinched became a child who ran to us for hugs again.

We did nothing clever.

We simply kept showing up, kept believing him, kept telling him he was safe, kept opening the door every single time he knocked, literally and otherwise, until the accumulated weight of ten thousand small proofs began, at last, to outweigh the single terrible night, and my son came back to himself.

It is the most important work I have ever done, and it looked, from the outside, like nothing at all.