Although in most ways that mattered the father and son could not have been more different, Raymond was also a bag of contradictions. He was a strong student, nearly all As, but had difficulty making eye contact. He was always looking down at his hands, which he more often than not kept in his lap, fingers interlocked. Taller than most twelve-year-old boys, he was still a stranger to puberty at an inch shorter than me, and so skinny that I was worried he might have an eating disorder. He was unfailingly polite, with lots of “Yes, ma’ams” that you don’t normally hear from city kids. Our shrink said that Raymond was suffering from one of the worst cases of PTSD he’d ever seen—and that included soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan.

Lauren and I met with Raymond for weeks before the trial, going over the questions and answers for his direct examination as if it were a play. When it came time for him to take the stand, he was spot-on.

“First it was just touching,” Raymond said when I asked him to recount his sexual contact with his father. “I don’t remember when that began, because it always seemed to have been that way. I was six or seven when he began putting his penis in my mouth. Ten when he started having sex with me.”

During prep, Raymond’s voice often quavered. Sometimes he cried. But on the stand, he was resolute. He even held eye contact with the jury, which was no mean feat for him—and something we’d practiced for hours.

The last question and answer still ring in my ears.

“Raymond, tell us why you agreed to testify against your father.”

“Because my father is also raping my mother and my little sister. Jennifer is only eight, and I need to make it stop.”

I had expected his father’s lawyer, Michele Sutton, to rely on the standard playbook for crossing children—come across as a sympathetic friend so that you build trust with the witness and appear like a decent person to the jury, then point out all the ways that children are prone to manipulation by prosecutors and other authority figures.

Instead, she went for the jugular with the very first question: “Isn’t it a fact that you, and not your father, are raping your little sister?”

Raymond looked at me from the witness stand, confused. I turned to Lauren, but she shook her head no. We couldn’t help him. He was on his own up there.

“No, that’s not true,” Raymond said. “My father did that to Jennifer. Not me.”