The forensic interview happened the next morning at the county child advocacy center, and I was not in it and never saw it, and I have read the transcript exactly once.

The interviewer was a woman named Priya Raghavan who has done that job for nineteen years.

There is a rug and a low table and two chairs and a camera in the ceiling, and there is a room behind a wall where a detective and a prosecutor sit with a monitor and can send in questions through an earpiece, and that is the entire architecture, and it exists because of exactly this problem: children tell the truth once, cleanly, to one person, and everything after that is degraded.

Charlotte was in there for fifty-two minutes.

Four things came out of that interview that had not come out on my lobby floor, and every one of them mattered.

The first was the Thursday.