She sat on my living room floor with Josie and a box of crayons and got more out of that little girl in twenty gentle minutes than an interrogation ever would.

And she was honest with me about the hard parts, about how healing is not a straight line, about how there would be setbacks and night terrors and birthdays that brought things up, about how a child who has learned the world is unsafe does not unlearn it in a month or a year, but slowly, in the accumulating evidence of a thousand ordinary safe days.

“You’re not going to fix them,” she told me once, kindly, when I was low.

“That’s not the job.