We played hide and seek for a bit this evening — historically a simple game with the Girl. Always so easily frightened, she would hide in the same places, places that felt safe and relatively near people, again and again, and it was never really all that difficult to find her. It was even easier when she was a toddler and would reply to the standard “Ready or not, here I come!” with a confirmation: “I’m ready!”

Today, playing with the Boy, we couldn’t find her. I directed the Boy to look in all the usual places, but she was in none of the usual places.

“Could she have dared to go downstairs?” I asked the Boy rhetorically, for his standard answer these days is “Yep.”

But we kept looking, adding a few new places. In her closet. Under K’s and my bed. Under the Boy’s bed. Finally, it was time for dinner, and we gave up. But I knew one trick to get her out: turn off all the upstairs lights.

And as I headed downstairs, there she was, in the hall closet, where she’d never hidden before. Where I would have never thought to look because imagining her closing herself in a tight dark space was simply unimaginable.

An eight-year-old is braver than a seven-year-old, it seems. A second-grader is able to keep quiet for a lot longer than a first-grader, it seems.