In a second room behind a one-way mirror sat a detective from the Norwalk police department, an assistant state’s attorney, a DCF investigator, and Dr.

Raghunathan.

I sat in the waiting room with a magazine about boats for eighty-five minutes.

The reason a father is not in the room is that a child in front of her father does not answer the interviewer, she answers him.

She watches his face for what the right answer is.

It contaminates everything, and a defense attorney will destroy it in eleven minutes at trial, and I understood all of that and it was still eighty-five minutes of the hardest sitting still I have ever done.

The interview protocol is deliberately dull.