But I held Grace’s gaze, and I kept my voice steady, because she needed steadiness from me now more than she needed anything else.

That was a thing I had learned across ten years of single motherhood, that in the hardest moments a child does not need you to have all the answers or to be unafraid.

She needs you to be steady, to be a fixed point she can hold on to while the ground moves.

I was not calm inside that living room.

My heart was breaking and racing and my whole past was rising up around me.