What none of the Beaumonts knew, as they stood in that hospital room feeling powerful, was that everything I had gathered was already gone — copied, and delivered, days before, into hands they could not reach.

A domestic-violence advocate had it.

A detective had it.

And a judge had it — a judge who, it would turn out, shared a long history with my father from a part of his life that neither man ever discussed.

I did not engineer that connection, and I want to be careful about it, because it would be easy to hear it and think the fix was in — that my father called in an old favor and bent the system to save me.

It was not like that, and the difference matters.