You cannot spin a ten-year-old’s grief.

You cannot cross-examine you laughed about it. Kingston had spent two years and considerable skill building a version of events in which he was the hero of his own reinvention, and it had held against every adult who might have challenged it — and it came apart in four seconds against a child who simply refused to pretend the cruelty was anything other than cruelty.

That is a power adults lose and children still have: the power to say the obvious true thing out loud, in a room full of people who have all quietly agreed not to.

Chapter 8 — The Drafts

Ione was going through the scattered photographs now with shaking hands.

“These are from before you told me it was over,” she said, her voice cracking.