“I made you about a hundred birds.”

I want to be careful about how I describe what recovery looked like, because it was not a switch that flipped.

Bernadette told me, over weak tea at the kitchen table while Birdie colored on the floor, that the first nights in the shelter the girl had still stood beside chairs instead of sitting in them, still gone quiet and watchful when a man’s voice carried up from the parking lot, still braced for a world that had taught her to brace.

Healing, the caseworker had warned them both, is not a straight line, and a child does not unlearn fear in a week because the source of it is finally in a cell.

What I saw that afternoon was not a cured child.

It was a safe one — which is a different and more important thing.