I had never once thought of her as tough, because nothing in the ordinary comfortable decades of our friendship had ever asked her to be, and so I had mistaken the absence of a test for the absence of the strength.

And then a test came, the most terrible one a person can face, and I watched Jessi Vance, hours from a stopped heart, unable to speak, having just learned that her husband of thirty years had tried to murder her in her sleep, do the single most clear-headed thing anyone did that entire day: she thought about the evidence.

Not about her pain.

Not about her broken heart.