2 ideas
Like an eye adjusting to darkness, understanding of a family's hidden life only emerges slowly and in retrospect. Details a child saw but could not interpret become legible decades later, once the viewer knows what to look for. The truth was present in plain sight all along. What was missing was the adjusted perception needed to read it.
The public, legal story of a crime (sibling jealousy, a disputed child, a verdict) differs from the private story known only to family insiders. When an outside writer investigates the case, a family member is pushed to assemble her own account from partial memories and unreliable relatives. Each surviving witness edits the past to protect themselves or the dead, so any 'true' version is a negotiated reconstruction rather than a recovered fact.