He could hit a wrist.

He could not hit a time-stamped file.

He could frighten a woman into silence across a breakfast table.

He could not frighten a court order, or a forensic audit, or an operating agreement he had signed two years before.

I had taken everything he did to me in the dark and moved it, piece by piece, into the light — and in the light, his whole kind of power simply evaporates, because it was never really strength at all.

It was only the ability to be cruel to someone who could not yet prove it.