“It’s perfectly all right,” she added, and now there was a cold thread under the warmth.

“You don’t have to remember anything right now.”

And that single sentence confirmed the whole of it, more completely than any document.

Because she did not say you don’t know me. An innocent woman, greeting a strange frightened child, says it’s all right, you don’t know me, I won’t hurt you. Evelyn said you don’t have to remember. You cannot ask a child not to remember something that never happened.

In four words she had admitted there was something to remember, and that she wanted it kept buried.