We stopped unsupervised visits that week.

Every one of them.

There was no negotiating it and no exceptions for holidays and no allowing ourselves to be talked out of it by anyone’s hurt feelings, because we both knew, in the particular way only survivors know, exactly what the next move would have been.

People asked us — the ones who were still speaking to us — whether we weren’t overreacting, whether we would really cut a grandmother off over some comments and some old history.

And I understood the question, because thirty years of training had installed it in me too.

But I had a clear answer, and it was this: I was not going to wait for proof written on my child’s body.