“Okay,” she said, and sat down on the floor next to her sister, because she would not use the chairs.

I got a civilian aide named Pearl to sit with them, who is sixty-four and has worked in that building for twenty-two years, and who took one look and got two blankets out of the supply cupboard without being asked.

Before I went back out, Charlotte asked me a question through the doorway.

She said: “Are you going to tell him that I told?”

And I had about a second to decide what to do with that, and what I did was the thing that woman from the advocacy center taught me in 2011, which is that when a child asks you a direct question you answer it directly and you do not decorate it.

“I’m going to tell my sergeant everything you told me.