The therapy was harder than the surgery, in its way, and slower, and Santiago said so to his grandfather once, on one of their Sundays, in the plain way he had of naming difficult things.

The body, he said, knew how to heal a wound; you gave it time and food and rest and it did the work itself.

But the mind that had learned, over years, that safety meant silence and that hunger was normal and that the person who was supposed to love you was the person most likely to hurt you — that mind did not heal on its own.

It had to be taught, slowly, that the rules had changed.