The warrant mattered.

The evidence mattered.

Sarah’s long patient year of building the case from the outside mattered enormously.

But all of that machinery was waiting, idling, for one thing it could not generate on its own — a person on the inside willing to speak.

And the person who finally spoke was five years old, and she spoke because she had been taught that she could, and that is a thing worth saying plainly and more than once.

We teach our children to tell us the truth and to come to us with the things that frighten them, and most of the time it feels like small housekeeping, like reminding them to wash their hands.