Tactical breathing. Box breathing. A technique soldiers are taught to override the body’s panic response, to force a nervous system that wants to fly apart back down into rhythm and control, to be able to think and act and shoot straight while the world is coming down around them.

He was not losing the fight with his own panic. He was waging it, right there in the chair, in the only way he knew how — and he had turned that hard-won discipline outward, and wrapped it around a two-pound baby.

For the first five minutes, she fought him. Her tiny fists beat against the broad plane of his chest, absurd, weightless blows.

Her cries kept tearing out of her. He did not flinch, and he did not do any of the things people do — he did not bounce her, or jog her, or shush her, or murmur.

He had clearly decided that all of that was more input, more sensation, more fuel for the fire, and that what she needed was less.

So he gave her less.