What she needed to see, what would actually help her heal, was the opposite: that there were systems, and rules, and a patient, orderly process by which even the powerful are held to account, that justice does not require becoming a monster, that you can be wronged terribly and respond with discipline rather than with rage.

I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, to put my hands on my mother.

Restraining that want, and choosing the slower, colder, lawful path instead, was partly strategy and partly, I understood later, a gift to my daughter: a demonstration, when she most needed one, that the adult responsible for her would meet cruelty not with more cruelty, but with the steady, unglamorous machinery of justice.

My hands wanted one thing.