And it ended because that same eight-year-old, alone and terrified behind a door a man was breaking down, was brave enough to hold onto one instruction from her mother and not let go of it.
Both times, the bravery was the same shape: trusting what she knew over what would have been easier, and acting on it.
I don’t know where she got it.
Some of it is just who she is.
But I like to think some of it came down to her from my mother — the woman who, at great cost and too late but finally, did the brave thing and turned over the evidence; the woman whose letter begged me not to let the darkness win.
Three generations of women in my family, and the through-line, when I trace it, is this: each of us, at the moment that counted most, found the courage to say the true thing out loud.