It very nearly worked.

That it did not is thanks to a therapist who told the simple truth, and a detective who asked, and the fact that having gone quietly to get help in my grief turned out to be the thing that saved my credibility when it mattered most.

I have never once regretted those sessions since.

If anything, I have come to see them as one of the quiet heroes of this whole story.

The version of me who, three years earlier, had been willing to sit in a counselor’s office and say out loud that she was not coping, that she could not sleep, that the grief was swallowing her, that vulnerable and honest version of me turned out to have left behind a record that could not be twisted.