The second is that I had prepared a victim impact statement and I did not read it.

I had written eleven hundred words over about three weeks.

It was, I thought, very good.

Ilse had read it.

Two friends had read it.

It had a line in it about the back seat that I had worked on for four evenings.

And I stood up in that courtroom with it in my hand and I looked at Gerald Rask, who was sixty-nine by then and much smaller than I remembered and who had been looking at the table since he came in, and I understood two things at once.

The first is that he already knew.