“The State’s Attorney’s office will review the file for felony child endangerment,” she said.

And I understood, watching my husband, that the man who had spent his whole life defending his father had just, finally and completely, stopped.

There is a particular power in security footage that testimony can never quite match, and I understood, watching Julian watch it, why it ended his defense of Arthur once and for all.

All his life, Julian had been able to hold onto ambiguity, to tell himself competing stories, to grant his father the benefit of a doubt that a loving son wants to grant.

Words leave room for that; a child’s account, however I believed it, could in theory be shaded or misremembered or incomplete.