On one late-night clip, her chief accountant let himself into the foundation office at two in the morning and sat down at a computer, and worked there alone in the dark for over an hour.

I made myself watch all of it, once, though Bruce told me I didn’t have to. I needed to see it — not the abuse, I’d lived the abuse, but the proof of it, the thing I had begun after six years to doubt was real.

That is what a house like Agatha’s does to you: it makes you the unreliable witness to your own life.

She had told me so many times that I was imagining things, exaggerating, being dramatic, that some part of me had started to wonder whether the bruises meant what I thought they meant, whether I really was the difficult, ungrateful woman she described.

Watching the footage cured me of that. There it was, in color, from the outside, undeniable: it had happened, exactly the way I remembered, and I was not crazy, and I had never been. I hadn’t known how badly I needed to see it until I did.

We thought, watching it, that it was over.