No one teaches you that in nine years of prosecuting these cases — how it feels when it’s your father, when the diminishment is on a face you have loved your whole life.

I had read that exact detail in a hundred case files, the victim who seeks permission before showing affection, and I had understood it intellectually as a marker of coercive control.

Feeling it, in my father’s arms, in that dim hallway, was a different kind of knowledge entirely, and it went into me like a blade, and it is part of why I did what I did with such complete and unwavering resolve.

They had not just stolen from him.