A mother’s greatest fear: she will not be there when her child needs her most. Our memories, our feelings for our children—happiness, pride, love, excitement, worry, anger, and pain—strike us so acutely they leave us raw. We grow inside out, our hearts hung around our necks. We put the oxygen mask over our children’s faces before we ever think to wear our own.

Few people know what happens behind the scenes of an American police shooting. Many law enforcement officers don’t want us to see, and federal judges don’t want us to know. But five mothers and one sister descended into the labyrinth after their sons and brother died and came back to tell their stories.

Police chiefs and district attorneys expected each woman to be quiet and go home, to surrender her dignity and accept the version of herself they needed her to be. Instead, these brave mothers and sister refused to be silenced.