“Your wife was eight weeks pregnant when she arrived in my operating room,” Dr.

Reed said, and his voice was quiet and lethal.

“It was twins.”

I will not dwell on that moment, or on the loss it named, because some griefs are too deep and too private to be turned into spectacle, and the loss of my children is one of them.

It is enough to say that I had not known I was pregnant, that my husband had not known, and that the attack had taken from me not one life but the beginnings of two, and that this was a wound that would never fully close, no matter how much justice came afterward.

Julian’s face lost every trace of color.