Charlotte has said, twice, that she wants to be a lawyer, and Evelyn told me that with a particular tone in her voice and I said, “Yes, I know,” and neither of us said anything else about it.

Their father is out in six years.

They have both been told this, at an age when they could hold it, by professionals whose job that is, and there is a plan for it, and I am not going to write about the plan.

People sometimes ask me what the most important moment of my career was, and they are expecting the syringe or the lobby or the courtroom.

It was none of those.

It was at about 4:14 in the afternoon on the ninth of April, when a seven-year-old asked me to promise something I was not allowed to promise, and I had about one second to decide whether to lie to her.