We live in a rented house in Kingwood, north of Houston, because it is forty minutes from her surgeon and eleven minutes from the pool.

She swims.

That is the thing nobody predicted and that I had nothing to do with.

She cannot run, and a kid who cannot run at nine finds out fast what she is excluded from, and some time in that first bad year a physical therapist named Bo Ruelas put her in a pool because it was the only load-bearing-free thing available, and she never came out.

She is thirteen and she swims six mornings a week and the brace comes off at the edge of the water and goes back on at the edge of the water, and in between she is faster than about ninety percent of the people in that building.