A skilled abuser does not only frighten the child in private; he manages the child’s reputation in public, patiently, over years, so that the child’s future testimony is discredited before it is ever given.

Roland spent three years telling everyone who might have listened that Nora and I were troubled, dramatic, manipulative, prone to lying for attention.

He was not doing it idly.

He was building, with each conversation, the frame through which any future accusation would be received — so that when we finally said he hurts us, it would land in ears already prepared to hear there they go again, the troubled girls, telling stories. He was inoculating the world against our truth.

And the terrible genius of it is that it makes the child complicit in her own silence, because the child senses, correctly, that speaking will not help — that she has already been made unbelievable, that telling will only confirm the story that she is a liar and possibly make things worse.