Lily is nine now. She still sleeps with the same stuffed rabbit, though it has been through the washing machine so many times its fur has gone soft and pale. She knows the basic shape of what happened to me — that my heart used to skip and slow in ways that scared everyone, that a doctor found it, that I have a small machine that helps it now. She does not know every detail of the courtroom, and I do not plan to tell her every detail until she is old enough to understand it without carrying it as her own burden. But she knows this much, because I have told her plainly, more than once:
“Nobody gets to decide what’s happening inside your body except you and your doctors. Not even people who love you. If you’re ever scared like I was, you don’t have to convince anyone. You just have to keep telling the truth until the right person listens.”
