There was another moral cliff.
Some people would say the lesson mattered more than her embarrassment.
Some would say privacy still matters, especially after a child makes a public mistake.
I understood both.
That’s what made it hard.
Doing right by children is not just keeping them alive.
It is also not crushing them under the weight of the lesson.
On Saturday morning, I saw Silas at the grocery store.
Not the big fancy one near the highway.
The small one with uneven floors and carts that always pull left.
He was in the canned soup aisle, comparing prices.
Without the neon vest, he looked different.
Still enormous.
Still scarred.
Still the kind of man people glanced at and then glanced away from.
But he was wearing a clean flannel shirt and holding a list written on the back of an envelope.
There was a little girl beside him.
