That is what it means to be made small: not to be given cheap gifts, but to be given no voice.

And so the deepest possible medicine was not to comfort her about the smallness, but to hand her back the very thing that had been taken, to make her, for the first time, the one who decided.

Caleb could have simply enforced his boundary himself and told Chloe it was handled, and that would have protected her.

But it would not have healed the specific injury, because it would have kept her, once again, a spectator to decisions made about her own life.

Instead he made her the decider.