That is how the room half-experienced it, once the shock wore off; that is how my cousin, breathless on the phone, had framed it.

But I could not experience it that way, standing at the back, watching my child, and I do not want to tell it that way, because to tell it as a triumph would be to celebrate the very thing I most grieve: that my nine-year-old had been forced into the position of a prosecutor, that she had spent months of her childhood gathering evidence and steeling herself, that the adults in her life had failed her so completely that a fourth-grader had concluded the only way to protect her mother was to become the one who exposed the truth.

What she did was brave.

It was also a tragedy — a child doing an adult’s terrible work because every adult who should have done it had, in one way or another, let her down.