My son was then asked questions for about twenty-five minutes.

Not aggressively.

Not unkindly.

Abascal was good at it, which is the point.

And I sat four feet away and let it happen, and I want to put on the record precisely what I let happen, because it is the thing I actually got wrong and because every parent reading this will do the same thing if it happens to them at seven in the morning.

My thirteen-year-old child gave a detailed account of a transaction that was the central evidence in a felony investigation against an adult, in the kitchen of the home of a police lieutenant, with that lieutenant present, with no legal advice of any kind, with no recording that I could see at the time, having been brought there in a marked police car by two officers who had come to our door before seven in the morning, after his mother had told him in the back of that car to tell them the truth.