They were manufacturing, entry by dated entry, the portrait of a manipulative and unstable girl — so that on the day she worked up the courage to tell someone what was happening to her, there would be a thick, official-looking record ready to prove that she was a liar.

They were not just hurting Maya.

They were pre-emptively destroying her credibility, so that her truth, when she spoke it, would land as the raving of a difficult child.

This is the part I most want people to understand, if they take nothing else from what happened to us, because it is the part I did not know to look for and it is the part that nearly worked.

The cruelty was not the whole of the plan.

The cruelty was almost the smaller half.