For months, Leo had been seeing something real, something that was actually happening, and every time the evidence of it reached him, the entire structure of the adult world around him had been arranged to tell him he was wrong, that Dad was just working late, that he was imagining things, that good boys did not think such things about their fathers.

A child in that position has only two choices.

He can decide the adults are right and that he cannot trust his own perceptions, which is a kind of quiet madness.

Or he can decide to trust himself and gather proof, so that when the moment finally comes, no one will be able to talk him out of what he plainly saw.

My son had chosen the second, harder path, alone, at twelve, and the notebook was not the record of a suspicious boy.