Maya had days when she went quiet and small again and needed to be coaxed back out, and days when a stranger’s raised voice in a store would empty the color from her face.

We were not, any of us, magically healed by a warm afternoon and a glass of lemonade.

Healing isn’t an event; it’s a long unglamorous practice, and we were early in it.

But something real had changed in the architecture of our little broken family, and I could feel it holding.

For years Elena and I had been two people managing a shared logistical burden named Maya, handing her back and forth, keeping score, each half-convinced the other was doing it wrong.

And then we had both, in our separate ways, nearly lost her — she in that kitchen, standing in a doorway telling our girl to run; me across a city, climbing a fence into a poisoned yard — and having nearly lost her together, we could not go back to bickering about pickup times.