Last month she told me something.

It was nothing — that is the point of it.

A girl at school had told her a thing in confidence about that girl’s family and had asked her not to tell, and Nell had carried it around for two days and then come and stood in the kitchen doorway at nine o’clock at night with her arms folded.

“I have to tell you a thing and I said I wouldn’t.”

And we sat down and she told me, and it was small and sad and entirely manageable, and I made one phone call the next morning to a woman I barely know and it was handled decently by adults.