I reassured him.

I explained his own feelings back to him in a calmer shape.

I told him about adjustment, and blended families, and giving people time.

I was, I thought, being a good mother.

I was teaching my son that his own alarm was a problem to be managed, and I had gotten so good at it that on the night it counted he did not come to me with words at all.

He wrote it down and slid it across the table, because somewhere in those months he had learned that a note was harder for me to explain away than a voice.