It has the shelter form and the recording and what my grandfather said at the table.

And it has me.

My eleven-year-old daughter had been sitting in a dark stairwell for four hours. She had cried so long she had lost her voice. When I asked her what was wrong she could not speak, she could only point at her own bedroom door.

That’s a real paragraph and I have known it by heart since I was twelve.

I want to be careful here, because when I finally said all this out loud my mother’s face did a thing I never want to see again, and because most of what she wrote is true and because she was defending me.

But I need to put down what it is actually like.