A third partner.

A confused nine-year-old.

Everything Brenda said that day was a lie dressed as an insight, and a child who hears such things said about her, in public, by an adult she has been taught to obey, can absorb them into her sense of herself if no one steps in to contradict them clearly.

So I set them down here the way I set them down for Hannah: named plainly as the cruelty they were, so that their power to wound could be broken.

A lie only keeps its grip in the dark.