She did not rage.

She did not weep for herself.

She stood, thin and upright and clear, and described what had been done to her in a steady voice, and the steadiness was more devastating than any breakdown could have been, because it made plain that the two people at the defense table had failed at the one thing they’d most wanted to do, which was to break her.

They had tried to erase her — legally, physically, psychologically.

They had staged her death, stolen her name, caged her body, and colonized her mind with a lie designed to make her complicit in her own imprisonment.

And here she stood, six years later, alive and named and free, calmly narrating their crimes to a jury.