I wanted that footage in my hands that night.

But I had learned, by then, to trust Silvia’s discipline over my own panic — and I understood the deeper wisdom of it, too.

For four years I had tried to fix things privately, by myself, keeping everything out of the light.

And each of those private, quiet, keep-it-between-us arrangements was the very condition under which my daughter had been hurt.

The abuse had lived in privacy.

The truth would live in the open, on the record, in a courtroom, where Richard could not manage it, or edit it, or make it disappear.