It was the determination to build something that would hold — because I had learned, from watching her, exactly what happens to the truth when someone lets their certainty outrun their evidence, and I was not going to become, even in the service of a good cause, anything like the woman I was finally standing up to.

Chapter 10 — The System

We did the unglamorous, necessary things, in order, the way you are supposed to and the way frightened families so rarely manage to.

We reported what needed reporting to the people whose job it is to protect children, and we cooperated fully, and we let the process be the process.

Because my mother still held volunteer positions that put her around children — at her church, at a community center, the kind of trusted-grandmother roles a lifetime of respectability had earned her — those disclosures mattered beyond our own family; they were the difference between a private reckoning and an actual barrier between her and the next child she might be handed.

The recording did the work I had hoped it would do when I slipped my phone into my coat.