Because if I had said yes, I promise, nobody will call your dad — which is what she wanted, and what a kind man would say, and which is what almost anybody would have said — then twenty minutes later, when that SUV came into the lot, I would have had to break it in front of her.

And she would have learned, at seven, standing in a police station holding the evidence she had carried in her shoe for two and a half miles, that adults who seem safe are the same as the other kind.

She would still have been rescued.

Her sister would still have been fine.

The case would still have run.

And something would have been broken in her that no court could get back.

So: do not promise a child something you cannot deliver.

Tell her exactly what you will do, and make it small enough that you can actually do it, and then do it.

That is the whole of what I know after thirty-one years, and it took a seven-year-old in a wet sweatshirt to teach me that it was the important part.