But it is a kind of violence, and Attorney Cardenas told me the law had names for it: fraud, coercion, conspiracy, the falsifying of medical records.

Names I intended to see him answer to.

I have thought a great deal about why that file frightened me more than anything else Christian did, and I believe it is because it attacked the one thing a person cannot live without, which is trust in their own mind.

For a year I had felt myself slipping — tired for no reason, foggy, uncertain, quicker to doubt my own perceptions than I had ever been.

And I had done what most of us do with that feeling, which is to turn it inward: I must be stressed, I must be weak, I must be coming undone.