“Mira didn’t tell anyone what was happening,” she said, “because she did not know she had the right to be safe in her own home.”

The courtroom went silent.

The judge had the logs, the pharmacy records, the notebook, the messages, the footage.

Mira never had to stand up and speak; her taped interview had already said everything.

And when the psychologist had gently asked her where she felt safest while all of this went on, her answer had been four words long: Wherever Rhys is.

I have thought about the guardian’s sentence more than almost anything else from those months, because it named the thing at the very bottom of it.