She did not know she was being rescued, did not know I had come home, did not know that the nightmare was ending even as she slept through it.

But I knew.

And I remember thinking, watching her pale face pass from shadow into light, that this was the thing all the training and all the documentation and all the careful preparation had been for.

Not to win an argument.

Not to convict anyone, though they would be convicted.

But this: to carry my mother up out of a basement and into the light, and to make certain, with everything I was and everything I knew how to do, that she would never be carried down into any darkness again.

The case would take months.