That is the shape of the whole work, the work Paulette tried to describe to me at the start.

You do not heal a child.

You make a place so reliably safe, for so many unremarkable days in a row, that the fear finally has nothing left to feed on, and starves, quiet and unwitnessed, and leaves an ordinary kid behind.

Because that was the childhood I wanted for them, the one their father would have wanted, the one I’d waited three years too long to help give them: not survival.

Just lost crayons.