There was only a little girl who believed that the truth was a thing worth carrying into a dark place, and who had carried it, and who now laid it on a steel table and looked up with clear eyes as if to ask whether she had done well.

She had done well.

She had done, in fact, the one thing that five years of lawyers and appeals and adult machinery had failed to do.

She had brought the truth.

It would be easy, and it would be wrong, to make of Chloe merely a lucky accident, a child who happened to stumble on a hidden box and happened to bring it at the right time.

The luck was real, but it was not the whole of it, and to reduce her to luck would be to miss the thing that actually saved her mother.