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We ended up getting takeout food and bringing it back to our room to eat. This was partly because I thought Ron had been through enough without also being subjected to a birthday celebration that she didn't want, but mostly it was because I knew she was wondering why this argument (disagreement) that her mother and I were going to have had to be done later in the evening, when she wouldn't be there.

And she was right; there was no reason to exclude her. We couldn't talk about those things in a public place, where we might be overheard, but that was a different question.

So, we sat around our small bedroom and ate Chinese food out of containers and talked about what had happened, and Jan said later that she had learned quite a lot from that talk. It had been a process, over quite a long time, for her to accept the fact that she couldn't think her way out of every situation, that some problems require more long-term solutions, if they can be solved at all.

But what Jan did not say that night was that the biggest part of learning that lesson was Ron herself. Our daughter had been outside of normal life, living on the street with no friends. Then she had discovered U-town, and had found a place to live and a few friends, and then we had adopted her (or she had adopted us), and all of this had been a process of bringing her back from the wild, as it were. That was a slow and complex process, and it was still going on.

And what I realized as we talked (though I didn't say it until Jan and I were in bed together and Ron was gone to sleep in her own room with her friends) was that this must be what Pete must be doing with starling. Slowly and carefully bringing her back to human society. That was pretty clearly demonstrated in her quick transition from torturing a man into a confession to protecting Ron from seeing something that she might find upsetting.

Jan commented that this was a loose analogy at best, trying to compare our 13-year old daughter, a former street urchin, with a mass murderer who was probably in her mid-forties. But then I reminded her about Ron's abrupt and unprovoked attack on her own sister and her subsequent indifference to her sister's violent murder, and she conceded that there might be more of a parallel there than she had thought.

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