What had been done to Bruno.

A dead child is owed, at the very least, the truth of his own death: his real name, his real story, the honest accounting of how he came to be gone, so that it means something, so that it changes something, so that the next child is safer for it.

My husband had tried to steal that from him.

And so when people asked me later why I did not simply take my living daughter and walk away, why I pushed the investigation, why I refused every offer to make it quiet — the answer was Bruno.

Someone had to make sure his death was not erased.

Someone had to insist that a little boy who liked dinosaurs had actually lived, and had actually died, and that the truth of it would be told out loud in a courtroom no matter whose reputation it cost.