I sat with that contradiction for a long time.

But the more I sat with it, the more clearly I saw that Chloe’s instruction had been an instruction for a specific world, the world as it stood on the day she wrote it, a world in which she was powerless and he was untouchable and hiding was the only protection available to a frightened girl.

She had not been wrong for that world.

But she had not been able to imagine this one, the world ten years on, in which her son was a healthy boy and not a vulnerable infant, in which the evidence she had so bravely gathered still existed, in which the man’s own ambition had pulled him out into the open and made him, for the first time, vulnerable to the truth.