I thought of Kayla beneath the porch light, terrified but no longer willing to carry the truth alone. I thought of Dolores Fitch and more than thirty families who found courage after watching someone else speak first.

I thought of my mother lifting a coffee pot with one hand and refusing to give in.

“I’m just somebody’s daughter,” I said.

The girl thought about that, then nodded, satisfied by an answer that sounded simple even though it carried something far greater underneath. She ran back to her mother.

Behind the register, my mother had hung a photograph of herself and my father from the diner’s opening week — decades younger, Dad in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, Mom beside him in a checked dress holding a coffee pot, both of them smiling as if they had no idea what that little diner would someday come to mean.

I looked at my father’s face. I kept my promise, Dad. I didn’t say it aloud. Something in my chest that had been unsettled for six years finally eased back into place.