And I could let myself simply grieve him, cleanly, as the good man he had been, without also having to defend him.

That, too, was a kind of freedom I had not had in ten years.

Chapter 25 — A Summer in Ohio

While the legal storm raged across the news, our family began the quiet, delicate, unglamorous work of rebuilding, and I want to be honest that it was work, and that it was slow.

A confession does not undo a decade in an afternoon.

Trust that has been broken has to be rebuilt one small ordinary act at a time, and there is no shortcut for it, and we did not try to take one.