And now my daughter was telling me, in a hospital room, that the same institution I had given thirty years to had reached into my life from the inside and handed her to predators.

Every soldier learns that the enemy is out there, past the wire.

No one teaches you what to do when the wire was breached from within, by someone who called you ma’am and meant you harm.

I need to explain what that betrayal did to me, because it was worse than the Langfords, and I say that having just come from my daughter’s hospital bed.

The Langfords were strangers who hurt my child; that is a grief and a rage a mother can understand, can aim, can act on.

But Rourke — Rourke was mine.