But that he did it coldly, on a plan, on a schedule, having first performed for months the role of a loving husband to a woman he had already, in the privacy of his own ledger, converted into money.

My daughter died believing, I have to hope, that she was loved.

She was not.

She was being counted.

And the man doing the counting stood by her casket in a beautiful suit and let strangers tell him how sorry they were.

He was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole.

I sat in that courtroom and heard the words and felt, honestly, very little in the moment — not triumph, not even relief, just a kind of vast exhaustion, the tiredness of a mother who has carried a body up a mountain and finally set it down.

Chapter 11 — The Burden She Carried