She wrote the date down without being asked.

That was the moment I stopped thinking of Zoe as a child I was shielding from this and started thinking of her, a little, as a partner in it — which is not a thing I am entirely proud of and not a thing I could entirely help.

There is a version of good parenting in which I would have kept the whole thing from her — handled it after bedtime, told her nothing, let her believe the weeks were ordinary.

I could not manage that version, partly because she is too observant to be kept out of anything happening in her own house, and partly, I will admit, because she was good at it, and I needed her, and it is a strange thing to need your own child.