The lock was stiff with rust, but it turned with a dull heavy click, and the door swung open into the narrow hallway of the carriage house, and I stepped out into the early morning light.

I had let myself in with my own patience.

I would remember that it was mine.

This matters to me more than I can easily explain, and I want to set down why.

In the weeks that followed, as the lawyers and the detectives and eventually the newspapers assembled their account of what had happened, there was a strong current pulling the whole thing toward a familiar shape, the shape where a woman is a victim who is acted upon, rescued, retrieved, saved.

And I understood the pull of that story, because it is comfortable, and because parts of it were even true.