That is the gift of a child’s honesty, and the indictment hidden inside it: that the reason children so often see what adults cannot is not that their eyes are sharper, but that their motives are cleaner.

They have not yet learned all the sophisticated adult reasons for looking away.

Mason reminded a whole town that the truth is usually not hard to see.

It is only hard to admit.

And it took an eleven-year-old, who did not yet know how to lie to himself, to admit it out loud.

Chapter 15 — The Cellar

An hour later, Delilah sat across from us in the magistrate’s office — and this time, for the first time, she was not weeping.

She had come, I noticed at once, with Wayne Vance beside her.