With time, and with a great deal of patient therapy, Nora and I stopped propping a chair against our bedroom door at night.

Nora enrolled in a university nursing program, determined to become the kind of person who listens when a patient is too frightened to speak.

I chose forensic accounting, following my father, because I had learned in the hardest possible way what he had always known: that numbers tell truths that cannot be shouted down, and that a careful record can defend the people who have been forced into silence.

My mother wrote us letters from prison over the years.