It offered counseling.

And, most important to me, it offered legal support, free of charge, to women who had been pressured, as I had been, into carrying a secret blame that was not theirs — women who had been told, by families and husbands and their own frightened love, that some hidden failure was theirs to bear in silence for the comfort of a man.

I had carried that silence alone for eight years because there was no one to tell me I did not have to.

I built a place, with the money my betrayers had tried to steal, to make sure the next woman would not have to carry it alone.

There is a justice in that which no courtroom could have provided, and it is the only kind I have ever truly wanted: not that my enemies suffer, but that their weapon be turned, permanently, into a shield for someone else.

Chapter 19 — Rose