She knew, in a general way, that something bad had happened, that Valerie had done something wrong, that she had been unwell and was now recovering.

But the specific texture of that suffering, the cot, the cold, the fog, seemed to have receded from her, and I did not force it back.

Her therapist told me not to; told me that healing does not require excavating every horror, that for a woman my mother’s age, the goal was not to process the trauma in exhaustive detail but simply to feel safe again, to rebuild the ordinary bedrock of security that had been ripped away.

So I did not make my mother relive the basement.