Paper is harder to dismiss.

Here was a protection order with my mother’s true name on it, and the date, and the name of the man she had fled.

Here were the records of a search, methodical and well-funded, for a woman and a small child.

Here, in the dry language of official forms, was the whole terrible machinery that had been set in motion around me before I was old enough to remember any of it — a powerful family, lawyers, investigators, the apparatus of money and influence turned toward the single purpose of taking a four-year-old girl from her mother.

I turned the pages one by one, and with each one the gentle story of my childhood receded further and the true one rose up in its place, and I understood that Prudence had opened this binder deliberately, in this order, so that I would not have to take any of it on faith.

Clement had trained her, or perhaps she had simply learned from the same instinct he had: that a truth this large cannot be told.