“Do you understand me?

Not brave like you weren’t scared.

Brave like you were scared out of your mind and you did the smart thing anyway.

That’s the only kind of brave that’s real.” She thought about that.

Kids think about things more carefully than we give them credit for.

And then she said, “Mommy was brave too,” and I said, “Mommy was the bravest of all of us,” and I meant it with my whole chest, because it was true, and because I wanted it to be the story my daughter told herself about that night for the rest of her life — not a story about a little girl who got trapped, but a story about two people who loved her so much that one of them stood in a doorway and told her to run, and the other tore across a city and climbed a fence to find her.