In the weeks after, casseroles and camera crews arrived, then vanished. Therapists used words like “integration” and “processing,” as if a vanished
life could be stapled back onto the present. Her room stayed the same; she did not. She flinched at doorbells, slept with the light on, laughed at the wrong moments. The town called it a miracle. Inside that house, it felt more like an aftershock that no one yet knew how to survive.
