For about six weeks she was extremely good.
Unnervingly good.
She cleared plates, she did homework without being asked, she told me she was fine roughly forty times.
Dr.
Roshan called that “the audition” and told me not to praise any of it, which was a strange instruction to follow.
Then in July she started asking me where I was going.
Every time.
Not anxiously — administratively.
Where are you going, how long, who will be here, what time exactly.
In August she stopped sleeping properly, and for about five weeks she came into my room around two in the morning and slept on the floor on a comforter she dragged in herself, and I let her, and Dr.
Roshan said to let her and to not make it a subject.
Then in September she got angry, which everybody had told me to hope for.
The worst of it was a Tuesday in October and it was ostensibly about a permission slip.
She screamed at me in the kitchen that I never believed her, which was not true about the permission slip and was extremely true about eighteen months, and then she said — and she is a precise child, and she chose it — “You didn’t even notice.”
I said, “You’re right.
I didn’t.”
She had prepared for a defense, and when it didn’t come she stood in the kitchen and cried, and I did not hug her, because Dr.
Roshan had told me that a hug in that particular moment ends the conversation for my benefit rather than hers.
