I had spent my whole adult life good at one thing, which was making things out of wood — measure twice, cut once, sand it smooth, a job with clear right answers that stayed done once you did them.

And here was a job with no clear answers at all, that would never be done, that no amount of measuring could get right the first time, and I was thirty-eight and single and had read three library books about trauma in twelve days and had no idea what I was doing.

But I understood one thing, standing in those doorways in the dark.

I understood that I was not going to be good at this for a long time, and that it did not matter, because good was not what those kids needed from me.