The woman he’s marrying, or the girl who does the laundry?

Theresa, who had watched juries for thirty years, said that one sentence was worth more than the whole rest of the file.

“Temper is loud,” she said.

“That’s not loud.

That’s a person explaining the mechanism.”

The endangerment question was the one that gave everyone the most trouble, and Chadworth learned things that year he would rather not have learned.

He learned that sustained psychological cruelty to a child is, in most states, extraordinarily difficult to charge unless something physical happens or a professional documents it in real time.