And I have thought a great deal about why it was a child, in the end, who broke the case open, when so many grown adults had failed — and I think the answer is both simple and worth saying, because it is a lesson about all of us.

Mason spoke up not because he was braver than the adults of our town, exactly, but because he was less compromised than they were.

The adults had reasons not to see the truth.

They had their comfort to protect, their good opinion of Delilah, their reluctance to admit they had judged Vivienne wrongly, their fear of being on the wrong side of a powerful woman’s story.

All of that formed a kind of fog in their minds, and the fog made it easy not to look too closely at what they had half-seen.