I’m sitting in my living room, cup of coffee in hand, surrounded by Christmas, and I can’t stop crying.

The tree is lit, steady and familiar, and everything in the room looks the way it always does this time of year. Nothing’s been disrupted. Nothing’s been taken away. The quiet holds. The warmth stays where it belongs. And yet, something inside me feels unmoored, as if I’ve drifted a few inches outside myself and don’t quite know how to come back yet.

I look at the ornaments and think about my children when they were small. I remember how they could lose themselves completely in the act of creating. Tongues caught between their teeth. Brows knit in concentration. Fingers sticky with glue as they tried, again and again, to get it just right. I can still hear the snip of scissors through construction paper—the pause, the careful turn before the next cut. Time moved differently for them then. The world shrank to color and shape and the seriousness of being four or five and trusted with something sharp. Their hands moved slowly, deliberately, within a reality that had never let them down. Safety wasn’t something they questioned or named; it was simply the way the world was. It was the room itself.

For Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, childhood was never allowed to remain intact.

. . .