At the door, she turned around. "They'll remember me," she said. "Every meal, every time it gets dark. You can't take that out of their heads."
"No," Thomas said. "But I can be there for every single one of those meals for the rest of my life. And I will."
The trial took eleven days. There was medical testimony, financial testimony, and fourteen months of recordings. There was a teacher who cried on the stand while a folded square of paper was entered into evidence. There was a defense attorney who argued that his client had been overwhelmed and unsupported and failed by an absent husband—and Thomas sat there and let that last part stand, because it was true.
And on the ninth day, there was a seven-year-old girl in a blue dress her mother had bought her, sitting in a chair so large her feet didn't touch the floor. She had asked to do it. Thomas had given her every chance to say no.
"If I don't tell," she'd said the night before, "will she be able to do it to other kids?"
The defense attorney asked Emma whether she understood that saying bad things about Rachel would help her stay with her father. He asked whether she might be remembering things as worse than they were.
Emma thought about it. Then she pushed up her sleeve, showed the jury the faint marks that hadn't quite faded, and said in a voice that carried to the back of the room:
"Being locked in the dark and told nobody wants you isn't discipline. That's just being mean. And I'm not remembering it wrong. I was there."
Nobody asked her another question.
The jury was out for six hours. They convicted on every count. The sentence was fourteen years.
At sentencing, Emma asked the judge if she could say something. Nobody had planned it. Nobody had coached her. She stood at the front of the courtroom and looked at the woman who had taught her to be smaller.