But I could do the one thing that was still possible, which was to refuse the erasure — to stand in a courtroom and in my own memory and insist, against everyone who would have found it more convenient to forget, that a child had been here.

It was not much.

It was the least a person can do.

But the least, done faithfully, when everyone else is doing worse than nothing, turns out to matter more than I ever would have guessed.

Chapter 17 — The Case

The criminal case moved over the following six months with a slow, relentless, grinding finality, and I attended all of it, every hearing, because I had promised a boy I never met that his death would be looked at squarely.