He was, at last, allowed to be exactly what the judge had ordered him to be: eight years old.
The healing did not happen all at once, and I want to be honest about that, because the tidy version — bad courtroom, good cottage, happily ever after — is not quite how a child recovers.
For a while, Rory still flinched at knocks on the door.
For a while, he checked windows in a way that broke my heart to notice.
There was a night, a few weeks after we moved in, when he woke up crying and could not tell me why, and I sat on the edge of his bed until dawn and understood that some of what his father had put into him would take years to come back out, and that some of it, maybe, never entirely would.
That is the part the clean stories leave off.
Cruelty to a child is not undone by a change of address.
It is undone slowly, by a thousand ordinary safe days stacked one on top of another, until the safe days finally outnumber the frightening ones and the body begins, cautiously, to believe them.
So that is what I gave him.
Ordinary safe days.