My granddaughter called me from the hospital at 3:17 in the morning, and before I even reached the ER, I already knew this was the night everything in our family would finally come into the open.

Marcus’s preliminary hearing was held in late summer. The courtroom was colder than necessary, as courtrooms so often are, as if bureaucratic air conditioning might substitute for moral clarity. He wore a navy suit and the expression abusive men cultivate when forced into public consequence: injured dignity. As though the real scandal were not broken bones and coerced silence, but the vulgarity of his being named.

I sat in the second row behind the prosecutor with Francis beside me and Brooke in the witness room down the hall until she was called. Diane sat three seats away, hands clasped in her lap so tightly I thought she might bruise herself. She had been sober-eyed and startlingly direct in the weeks leading up to the hearing, as though truth, once finally chosen, had stripped something ornamental from her. She looked older. More like herself.

When Brooke was sworn in and took the stand, the whole room changed shape for me.