My son sobbed the entire drive to his grandmother’s house. “Daddy, please don’t leave me here.” My wife snapped, “You’re babying him.” I left him anyway. Three hours later, a neighbor called. “Your little boy ran to my house shaking. He’s hiding under my bed and won’t stop crying.”

William took a breath. “People can feel attachment, possessiveness, dependence, and even genuine bursts of tenderness. Love, in any meaningful protective sense, is incompatible with deliberate terrorizing of a child.”

The courtroom went so quiet he could hear a camera shutter from the back.

Defense counsel tried to suggest William’s expertise made him biased, that he saw pathology everywhere.

William met the question with a calm that surprised even him. “My expertise is precisely why I can tell the difference between structure and abuse. This was abuse.”

The jury deliberated just under four hours.

Guilty on all counts.

Sue was sentenced first. Seventy-three years old, one side of her face permanently scarred from the spade, she sat upright in a wheelchair and glared at everyone as if the room were conspiring against truth rather than finally serving it. The judge gave her twenty-five years. It was, effectively, a life sentence.