Marion shot to her feet, her face going red.

“This is outrageous!

There is no possible way she could have — ”

“Sit down, ma’am,” the judge said.

He did not raise his voice.

He did not need to.

It was firm, and it was absolute, and Marion sat back down hard, as though the words had physically pressed her into the bench.

And I sat and listened to a judge read aloud, into the official record of a courtroom, the whole architecture of a betrayal I had lived inside, alone and doubting my own sanity, for two years.