But a thing written down, dated, at the moment it happened, is no longer in my memory.

It is outside me, fixed, beyond the reach of his revisions and my own doubt.

He could tell me I had misremembered a conversation.

He could not tell me I had misremembered a bank statement I had photographed and dated eleven months earlier.

Writing it down took the truth out of the contested space of my own frightened mind and put it somewhere he could not follow to alter it.

That is what a record is, for a person in my position: not evidence for a future court, though it becomes that, but first and most importantly a place to keep the truth safe from the daily campaign to erase it, including the campaign that had gotten inside my own head.