And because my daughter had spoken up before the damage became permanent, my own body was given the chance to come back.

I sat through every day of it that I was allowed to, and I want to say why, because it mattered to me in a way I did not expect.

It would have been easier to stay away, to let the lawyers handle it, to protect myself from the sight of her.

But I went, and I made myself present for the whole machinery of it — the evidence entered, the testimony taken, the counts read, the verdict returned — because that machinery was the exact opposite of what Ottoline had done to me, and I needed to witness the difference.

She had worked in secret, in the dark, forging a false story of natural illness that no one was ever meant to examine.

The court did the reverse: it dragged every hidden thing into the light, examined it in the open, tested it against evidence, and arrived at the truth in a way that could be seen and checked and trusted.