And that reversal, that cold transformation of a wound into a weapon, was the thing I most needed the judge to see, and now he had seen it, in Michael’s own house, in Michael’s own voice.

There is a particular horror in hearing your own child’s voice say a cruel thing to you, played back in a public room, and I had braced for it and still it undid me a little.

Mom, you’re making this worse.

Five ordinary words.

But inside them was the whole architecture of the abuse, the way the abuser reassigns the fault, makes the victim the author of her own injury.

I was not making anything worse.