With the funds the court recovered, I opened something of my own — a center for survivors of domestic abuse, a real place with real beds and real help, for the women and children no one else would stand between and the danger.

I named it the Three Fireflies Center, for my three daughters. For the three small lights a cruel woman had once called worthless.

I run it myself. I know what the women who come through the door need before they say it, because I was them, standing in a grand dining room with a coffee tray and a bruise, invisible to a room full of people who’d come to save women exactly like me.

So I make sure no one who comes to the Three Fireflies is invisible. I make sure someone looks at them.

I make sure someone believes them the first time, and shows them the footage of their own strength when they’ve been made to doubt it, and stands between them and whoever taught them to be small.

It is the work I was put here to do, and I would never have found it if a woman had not slapped me in front of forty people, and one man at the end of a long table had refused to look away.