The children who always smiled and laughed during the day, suffered profoundly at night. Maybe it was the darkness that brought it out or, perhaps, they were so used to chaos that the calm and quiet that came with the evening terrorized them. They had nothing to distract them, nothing to focus on but memories they wouldn’t talk about, monsters they didn’t want to face. As a healer within the Northern Tribe, Azalea got a first-hand account of severe night terrors and bedwetting, little ones screaming for parents that still hadn’t been located, eating disorders, and coping mechanisms.
Trauma, she’d learned, doesn’t create empty space.
In the holes where love and safety should have resided within the children, they were instead filled with coping mechanisms. Ways they’d learned to survive a
