What Nita actually got was her mother’s mother, a woman named Vesta Pearl Odom, who drove down from Longview on a Tuesday in November, packed her granddaughter’s room into a Suburban in two hours, and took her home.

Vesta Odom was sixty-eight years old and she walked into that house past four adult Gaddises and nobody stopped her, and I have never met her and I would stand up if she came into a room.

Here is what it cost Nita and I am going to set it out plainly because the sixteen-year-old who does the right thing is always the last person anybody follows up on.

She lost her father, who is in Huntsville and who she has not spoken to since the September hearing.