But underneath all of that, some older and steadier part of me was still thinking, still calculating, still refusing, and it was that part that moved my hidden hand to my wrist.

I think it came from a lifetime of being underestimated, of being the quiet, agreeable wife, of learning to survive in the shadow of a domineering man by staying watchful and self-contained while appearing soft.

The very habits that had made me small in my marriage, the watchfulness, the containment, the instinct to observe and record rather than react, turned out, in the one moment it mattered most, to be exactly the habits that saved my life.

I had spent three years making myself quiet.

And in the end, it was the quiet, watchful, calculating self I had become in that quiet that had the presence of mind, while dying, to press a button and preserve the truth.

The marriage had tried to erase me.

And the person it had shaped, in trying to erase me, was precisely the person who refused to be erased.

Chapter 2 — The Fabricated Scratch

It had begun, that afternoon, when Selina burst through our front door in tears, clutching her forearm, on which there was a small, superficial scratch, the kind you might get from a thorn or a cat.

“Julian,” she sobbed, in the trembling voice she had perfected.

“I didn’t want to come here.

But Nora pushed me.

She cornered me downtown.

She tried to hurt me.”