“A little metal capsule.

The one I swallowed, so that he would never find it.”

I did not understand yet.

I want to be careful, here, telling this part, because what my mother had done was born of a desperation I hope no one reading this ever knows — the desperation of a woman who has discovered something monstrous, and has no one to tell, and no one who will believe her, and a son-in-law who searches her house.

It was not a clever trick.

It was the last resort of a person who had run out of every safer one, and it had almost killed her, and I would not have anyone imagine it as anything but what it was: the terrible, dangerous, final choice of a woman who had nowhere else on earth to hide the truth except inside her own body.