And then he said the sentence he had been building toward, which was: “I want the family to know I never intended for anyone to be harmed.”

Sophie went completely still beside me.

He did not look at us while he said it. He looked at the board. That is the detail I keep — that he delivered his one line about us to three strangers with clipboards, because we were the audience and they were the decision.

Then it was her turn.

Her statement was ninety seconds long. She did it without notes.

She said her name. She said she was six years old and that her father had handed her a phone in a garage and told her to hide it, and that she had hidden it for seven years, and that she wanted the board to understand that a threat made to a man in 2016 had been carried by a child until 2023.