The detective who took our statement was a steady woman named Cortese who had worked cold cases for two decades, and she told us, near the end of it all, something I have held onto.

She said that in her experience the hardest cases to ever break were exactly these — the ones that happen inside a family, behind a locked door, to people who have been trained since childhood to protect the very person hurting them.

Not because the evidence isn’t there, she said, but because everyone who could speak has a lifetime of reasons not to.

“You’re not going to believe how many of these sit for decades,” she told Julian, “waiting for one person to walk in and put the thing on the table.

You did the hard part.

You walked in.” I watched that land on my husband — the idea that the walking in, the thing he’d been unable to do for twenty years, was the whole ballgame, and that he had finally done it.