It was the sound of tenderness, not menace, the sound of a person so devoted to a living culture she had kept alive for twenty years that she chatted to it while she fed it, encouraging it, checking on it, the way you might talk to a cat winding around your ankles at dinnertime or a plant on a sunny windowsill.

She had been nurturing something the whole time.

I had heard nurture and, through a locked door and an old fear, mistaken it for something sinister.

Everything I had found frightening resolved, one item at a time, into something almost heartbreakingly gentle.

Zachary told me later that watching my face during that unraveling was one of the funniest and most touching things he had ever seen, because he could track, feature by feature, the moment each piece of my terrible story dissolved.

The tightening around my eyes when the flour turned out to be flour.