Consider it from where she stood.

She had warned me three times and been dismissed three times, each time a little more coldly.

She had gone to confront the woman herself and been hurt for it.

She was sitting on her aunt’s couch at three in the morning with a split lip and a swollen wrist, and every scrap of evidence she had accumulated in months of frightened searching had, so far, bought her exactly nothing but her father’s irritation.

Any reasonable person, at that point, protects herself.