Hannah flinched hard at the shout, and something clicked into terrible focus for me.

The stolen-brooch story had never been about a child’s misbehavior at all.

It was a cover — a manufactured justification my sister had built to explain, to her staff and her neighbors and perhaps to herself, why a little girl was sleeping with the pigs.

She had needed Hannah to be a thief, so that she could be a disciplinarian instead of what she actually was.

The lie was not incidental to the cruelty.