The fourth was a friend of fifteen years who told me, in a bar in Old Colorado City, that a nine-year-old will say anything and that I had blown up my life on a child’s account of a conversation she was not equipped to interpret.

I asked him whether he would want a version of that argument used about his own daughter.

We have not spoken since, and I regret it, and I would do it again.

And then there were about seven people who did something I had not remotely expected, which was to come and tell me things.

Emily from Hannah’s school called on the Tuesday.

She had noticed, in the spring, that Hannah had twice been picked up by “her stepmom” without the office being notified, and had thought it was odd and had done nothing, and had been thinking about it since Saturday.