She thought she’d won by making it vanish.

She had merely signed her name to every step of the vanishing.

Julian’s head dropped, and a broken sound came out of him as the troopers walked him out into the bright morning, and I stood in my father’s tidy hallway with a stranger’s pearl earring against my shoe and felt, not triumph exactly, but the deep settling of a thing put right that had been very badly wrong.

Chapter 14 — The Trial