Some clear instinct in her, some child’s unerring sense of where safety lay, turned her toward her mother and away from the stranger wearing her father’s face, and though it broke my heart to see her have to make that choice at all, I was fiercely glad of where she made it land.

Whatever else she lost that day, and she lost a great deal, she did not lose her footing, because she knew, without being told, that the ground beneath her was me.

I would spend the years afterward making sure that instinct had been right, that whatever the world did, she could press herself against my side and be safe.

That became, quietly, the organizing purpose of the years that followed, larger than the trial, larger than my own healing: to make a home so steady that my daughter would never again have to wonder which grown-up in the room was telling her the truth.

It is the one promise, of all the promises shattered that day, that I was still able to keep.