My hands shook as I did it, the way they had shaken the night I first told my parents everything, ten years and a whole lifetime before.

And when it was done, when the evidence was logged and receipted and in the proper hands at last, I walked out of that courthouse into the ordinary morning light and stood on the steps and breathed, for what felt like the first time in ten years, all the way to the bottom of my lungs.

I thought about Julian on those courthouse steps.

I thought about how he had believed, with the pure stubborn faith of a young man who had not yet been taught to expect the worst, that if you just got the truth into the right hands, the system would work, justice would be done, the powerful would be held to account.