“And I will not spend the rest of my life covering up crimes for the man I found at that farm today.” Because that is the thing no one tells you about loving a child who has done something monstrous: the child you loved and the man who did it are, and are not, the same person, and you grieve the one while you refuse to protect the other, and both feelings are true at once and neither cancels the other out.

Around midnight, Brock was arrested.

He called me from the detention center soon after, and his voice was pure fury.

“How could you do this to me?

I’m your own flesh and blood.” “And Natasha,” I said, “is a human being who deserved basic decency — which should have been reason enough for you never to have done this.” He told me I would regret it for the rest of my life, and the line went dead, and I sat down and cried harder than I had cried at my husband’s grave.

And I did not withdraw a single word of the complaint.