That evening, as fireworks lit the sky over the lake, I decided that justice doesn’t always repair what was broken. Sometimes it only clears the wreckage, so you can walk into the future without carrying anyone else’s lies.

I said that sentence for seven years. I said it to a journalist and I said it at dinners and I said it to myself on bad nights, and it held up beautifully right up until my twelve-year-old daughter sat down across my desk with a laptop and asked me where the wreckage had actually come from.

End of Part One.

Part Two

Chapter 12 — Nine Hundred Thousand

My daughter found the file on a Tuesday in October, in her room, on a laptop I bought her, on a platform I approved.

She was twelve years and four months old. She had been assigned a school project on media ethics — the irony of which I have had seven months to appreciate — and she had done what every twelve-year-old on earth does when handed a search bar and a topic.

She searched her own family.