So the very first thing I did — before the phone, before the plan, before any of it — was tell her the only thing that mattered.

“You didn’t lose anything, baby,” I said.

“You didn’t do a single thing wrong.

And there is no more game.

That game is over forever.”

I have thought so many times about the ordering of that morning, about the fact that before I called anyone, before I formed a single plan, before I let myself feel one degree of the rage that was coming, I stopped, on the shoulder of a foggy road, and told my frightened five-year-old that she had done nothing wrong.

And I am prouder of that ordering than of almost anything else I did in the whole ordeal, because I have come to understand it was the most important thing, more important than the evidence or the lawyers or the custody decree.