And that, more than any text message she read aloud, is the truest indictment of the man.

His nine-year-old daughter had a functioning conscience that he did not have, and had used it to judge him, and he could not even recognize what he was looking at.

I will not let him take her agency from her, not because it matters to my pride, but because it was hers — the one entirely self-authored thing in that whole terrible affair, the act of a child’s own conscience — and it is the thing about that day I am, despite everything, most in awe of.

She should never have had to do it.