But a child who has suffered and gone quiet, who has folded the suffering down into a stillness and a gravity beyond their years, produces a different and more disturbing effect, because it forces the adults around them to confront how much a child can carry, and how alone they must have been to learn to carry it.

The inmates who fell silent as Chloe passed, the officers who found they could not look at her, were not responding to a child in visible distress.

They were responding to something harder to bear: a child who had clearly been through something enormous and had been so alone in it for so long that she had stopped expecting anyone to help.

That is what reached into those hardened people.