She'd thought about it for weeks. The way you said a sentence that would reorder a small person's world, and said it in a way that made the new order feel safe rather than precarious.
She'd talked to the child welfare consultant — a woman named Dra. Santos who had the particular patience of someone who had sat with parents through a hundred versions of this conversation. Dra. Santos had given her language to use, framings, the specific avoidance of words that carried weight adults assumed children didn't feel. She'd practised some of it alone in the kitchen at night when Daniel was asleep.
In the end it didn't go the way she'd practised.
It was a Saturday evening in mid-December, Leonardo having left two hours earlier, and Daniel was in the bath — a bath that he was ostensibly taking bu
