Officers who had spent their careers hardening themselves against every kind of human misery found themselves, inexplicably, looking away, as though the sight of her were too much to hold.

There was something about the child, about her stillness and the terrible grown-up patience in her eyes, that reached into people and touched a place they had thought the job had closed off long ago.

None of them knew what she was carrying.

All of them, somehow, could feel its weight.

There is a thing that happens sometimes in the presence of a child who has suffered without being broken by it, and it happened in those corridors that day.

We expect suffering children to show their suffering, to cry, to cling, to need comforting, and when they do, it summons in us a straightforward protective tenderness.