He was telling her, in the most concrete way a child can understand: you are not a leaf on the wind.

You get to decide.

I have turned this over many times, and I have come to think it was the single most healing thing anyone could have done for my daughter, more healing than any amount of comfort, because it addressed the deepest wound directly.

The wound Beatrice had inflicted was not really about candles or place cards or even about being called Caleb’s girl.

The wound was about power, about a child being made to understand, again and again, that things would be decided about her, over her head, without her, and that she had no say in any of it.