She spent two hours trying to decide whether she was being silly.

Her therapist told Evelyn, and Evelyn told me, that this is entirely typical and is the single most common presentation in children who protect other children: that the guilt does not attach to the abuse, it attaches to the delay.

She had also, in that period, developed something else.

For about eighteen months, Charlotte would not let Delilah out of her sight — not at school, not at a friend’s, not in another room in their own house.

Which is not devotion.

It is a seven-year-old who has concluded that she is the only functioning safety system, and it is exhausting, and it does not switch off because a man went to prison.