I understood why they worried, but they had it backwards.

Sitting in that courtroom, day after day, watching the slow, meticulous machinery of the law take apart what my family had built in the dark — this was the opposite of trauma.

It was repair.

For weeks in that hospital bed I had been the only person who knew the truth, holding it alone, unable even to speak it, while everyone around me was lied to.

The trial was the truth finally becoming public and permanent, entered into the record, decided by people whose job was to weigh it fairly.

Every exhibit read into evidence was a thing I no longer had to carry alone.