I stared at my mother — this woman who had spent the whole morning with her eyes fixed on her purse, who had let my father humiliate me and said nothing, whom I had spent my life regarding, with a daughter’s unfairness, as weak.

And I saw, for the first time, that I had misread her as badly as I had misread Lucas.

She had not been weak at all.

She had been doing, for years, and without a word, the most dangerous thing a person in that house could do: documenting her own husband’s crimes, and preparing, and waiting.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because I knew what he was,” she said simply.