But it was the truth.

And I will not let him rewrite it.

There is, I have come to see, a painful irony in Luca’s accusation, and it reveals something true about him that even the wedding did not fully expose.

In claiming that I must have manipulated Kelly, he was, without realizing it, revealing his own inability to imagine a child acting from conscience.

Luca could not conceive that a nine-year-old might, entirely on her own, look at the evidence of her father’s behavior and reach a moral judgment about it — because Luca himself did not operate from conscience, and a person who lacks a thing often cannot recognize it in others.