The emergency caseworker stepped forward, gently, and eased my sleeping daughter from Julian’s shoulder and into a soft, warm blanket, and Maya stirred but did not wake, and the caseworker carried her away, toward a quiet private room where my own family lawyer was waiting, safe, out of the noise, out of earshot of everything that was about to happen to her father and grandmother.

I watched my daughter go to safety.

Only once she was gone, warm and asleep and no longer in the arms that had abducted her, did I turn back to my husband.

I want that order of events understood, because it was not accidental, and it reveals what the whole ordeal had actually been about, underneath the drama of protocols and marshals and confrontations.

Given the chance, at last, to face the man who had wronged me, to deliver the speech I had every right to deliver, to savor the moment of his ruin, I did not take it first.