Not only for your work, which is exceptional.

But because you are the living argument for the thing this whole center is meant to stand for — that the truth, properly documented, can be trusted to speak for itself.”

I have carried that phrase with me ever since — that the truth, properly documented, can be trusted to speak for itself — because it is, I have come to think, the entire moral of my life compressed into a sentence, and because it names precisely the thing my family had spent twenty-two years trying to make impossible.

The reason a family like mine can operate for so long, unchecked, is that they work in a medium where nothing is documented.

It is all deniable.

The cruelty happens at dinner tables, in living rooms, in the private space between family members where there are no records, no witnesses who will testify, no paper. You’re imagining it.