So that’s where I am. Maddie’s off the pill now, finally. She’s got more energy, the rash is fading, and last week she ran around the backyard like a regular eight-year-old and I just stood at the window and bawled.

But every three months I still have to take my baby in for a blood draw. Same as always. Only now it’s to watch a wound that a pill put there. A pill I gave her. With orange juice. Twice a day. Because a man in a nice office looked me in the eye and told me he was helping her.

I haven’t found a way to forgive myself for trusting him. I don’t know that I will.

And here’s a thing I haven’t told a soul until right now. A couple weeks back, Maddie wandered into the kitchen while I was crying again, and she put her little hand on my arm. “Mama, are you sad because of my pictures?” she asked. The brain pictures, she meant. The tests.

I told her no, baby, I’m just happy you’re feeling better. She nodded like she believed me, then she said something that knocked the wind clean out of me. “Does this mean I’m not broken anymore?” Four years she carried that around. Four years she thought there was something wrong inside her, because I told her there was. Because he told me there was.

I knelt down right there on the kitchen floor, hugged her so tight I could smell the strawberry shampoo in her hair, and I told her she was never broken. Not for one single day. I don’t think she fully understood. But I needed to say it more than she needed to hear it, I expect.

So that’s the whole sorry story. Maddie’s running and laughing again, and that’s the part I hold onto. But there’s another blood draw on the calendar for next month. And I’ll sit in that little chair holding her hand, watching them check the harm, knowing I poured it down her throat myself. Every morning. With orange juice.