My son found out about the court date because I had asked Detective Abascal to tell me, and because I then made the decision to tell Julian, and I have been asked whether that was right and I do not know.

And in the November of 2024 I was looking for a stamp and I found, in the back of the drawer in Julian’s desk where the mint tin lives, nine receipts from money orders, in sequence, forty dollars each, made out to the clerk of the court, with a case number on them.

Three hundred and sixty dollars, across nine months, out of a paper route and a lawn-mowing summer, sent anonymously by a fourteen-year-old boy against a stranger’s fine, with no return address, which means that Dusty Vandermolen has no idea where they came from and almost certainly assumes it was his mother.

I put the receipts back in the drawer and closed it and did not say anything for eleven months.