It arrives exactly like this — as an absence, as a thing that used to happen and quietly stops.

There was no morning Ollie woke up healed.

There was only a slow accumulation of un-events: the night he didn’t check on Josie, the meal he didn’t pocket a roll, the closed door that didn’t frighten him, the sister’s cry he didn’t leap for.

Each one nothing.

Each one everything.

You cannot watch healing while it happens, because healing is the name we give to the slow subtraction of fear, and you don’t notice a fear leaving the way you noticed it arrive; you notice, one ordinary Tuesday, that it’s been gone a while.

The purple crayon was the first time I caught it in the act — caught the exact moment a piece of Ollie’s vigilance fell away and was not replaced, and left behind a plain bored seven-year-old coloring on the floor.