For most of us, safety is a background condition, assumed, unnoticed, the water we swim in without seeing.

We do not feel safe, most of the time, any more than we feel the air; we simply are, and take it for granted, and only notice it in its absence.

Jessi had lived for years inside a danger she could not see, sleeping every night beside the person most determined to end her, feeling — I have no doubt — perfectly safe, because the threat wore the face of her husband and safety, to her, meant being beside him.

Her sense of safety had not merely been mistaken.