That was the whole thing.

He had heard his sister need something and had not felt it as a threat.

He had let it be what it actually was, which was a lost crayon, a nothing, a normal small dumb problem in a normal safe childhood.

I had to go into the kitchen so he wouldn’t see me lose it over a purple crayon.

Because I had learned, by then, that healing does not announce itself.

It does not arrive as a breakthrough, a big weepy scene, a moment you could put in a movie.