And yet the theft was, in a courtroom, the cleaner case, the one with wire transfers and account numbers and a paper trail that no jury could doubt, while the abuse, had it stood alone, might have dissolved into the murk of one adult’s word against another, of a grieving father against an elegant fiancee, of the deniable, hard-to-prove nature of psychological cruelty toward children too young and too frightened to testify well.

It is a hard truth about how the world handles the abuse of children: that it is often the most damaging crime and the hardest to prove, precisely because it happens in private, to the powerless, and leaves no wire transfers behind.

What saved my daughters, legally, was partly luck, the luck that the same woman who abused them was also greedy enough to rob me in a way that left a trail.

But it was also the cameras, and the audit I ordered on instinct, and Marisol’s willingness to stand as a witness.