Bruno was five years old.

He liked, his sister-in-arms told me later, dinosaurs and orange popsicles and a cartoon about a dog who was also a firefighter.

He was a small, real, whole person, with a favorite color and a laugh and a mother who, whatever her terrible failures, loved him.

And through the negligence of the adults who were supposed to keep him safe, he died in a way that no child should ever die, and then a powerful man tried to take even his name from him, to dress his death in someone else’s coat and file it under someone else’s insurance and make him disappear so that the grown-ups who had failed him would not have to answer for it.

That was the thing I could not forgive, and it was the thing that steadied me through everything that came after.

Not only what had been done to my own child — who was, thank God, unharmed.