I testified for about ninety minutes on the second day.

The cross-examination lasted forty minutes and was conducted by a very good attorney who was pleasant to me throughout, and it consisted almost entirely of an attempt to establish that I had decided Douglas Sinclair was guilty at 4:14 in the afternoon and had spent the rest of the day arranging facts around it.

He asked me eleven times, in various forms, why I had not simply released two children to their legal father.

And the eleventh time, I said the thing I had not planned to say.

“Because his daughter asked me not to, and I didn’t have any reason not to believe her, and I have never in twenty-nine years been able to work out why a seven-year-old’s account is the only one we treat as automatically unreliable.”

The judge did not strike it.