So they build a floor the only way they can, out of the one material available, which is themselves — they decide it must be their own fault, that they were unlovable, or bad, or too much, because a bad child in a fixable world is somehow more bearable than a good child in a world where the grownups simply don’t come.

Ollie had spent three years quietly concluding that the reason no one rescued him was that he did not deserve rescuing.

He had taken the entire weight of the adults’ failure and set it on his own small back and called it justice.

And there is no argument that undoes that, no single conversation, because it isn’t really a belief, it’s a scar, and you cannot reason a scar away.

All you can do is what I set out to do from that night forward: be, relentlessly and boringly and forever, the evidence against it.