I wanted my son to grow up without ever once learning that the people who were supposed to protect him had done the opposite, though someday, carefully, when he is old enough, I will tell him the truth, and I will tell him that his sister saved his life.

The sentences, the registry, the protective order — I was grateful for all of it, but not because it hurt them.

I was grateful because it built a wall.

Every one of those legal facts was another course of brick between my children and the past, and that is all I ever needed them to be.

Justice, for me, was never about what happened to the two of them.

It was about what would never happen to us again.