I never opened the door for the bad man.
Not once.”
“You were so brave,” I wept into her hair.
“You were the bravest girl in the whole world, and it’s over, it’s over now.”
I have thought since about the symmetry of it — that this whole nightmare had begun with my daughter’s courage and ended with it too.
It started because an eight-year-old noticed something wrong and was brave enough to tell me, when the easiest thing in the world would have been to say nothing, to assume the adults had it handled, to not want to get Grandma in trouble.