Noah had written something.

He’d worked on it for two weeks.

He wouldn’t let me read it and he wouldn’t let Chloe read it, and he printed it at the library rather than on the printer at home, which tells you how much of it was his.

He was told he had no standing.

It happened at the table, quietly, before the session opened.

He is not a victim of record; there is no financial loss attributed to him, no charge relating to him, no line anywhere in eleven hundred pages that says a six-year-old was used as an instrument to open a family.