And somewhere across the years that person had been replaced, cell by cell, by someone who could hurt an old man and dress him in wool and sleep fine at night, and I do mourn the first Julian, the boy in the driveway, the way you mourn anyone who dies.

But he had been dead a long time before the troopers came, and the thing wearing his face had spent months torturing my father, and I refuse — I have decided this, firmly, and I hold to it — I refuse to let my grief for a boy who no longer existed buy one ounce of mercy for the man who had taken his place.

My father needed a prosecutor, not a sentimental sister.

So I was a prosecutor.