“Everything all right in here?” Before anyone else could speak, Trent snapped, “We’re fine.” His voice cracked on it.

Those two words — family matter and evidence — are the whole hinge of my story, and I have thought about the difference between them ever since.

Because family matter is the exact phrase that had kept me trapped for three years.

It is the phrase that closes doors.

It is what abusers say, and what the people around them are so relieved to accept, because it draws a line around the cruelty and marks it private, off-limits, no one else’s business — a thing to be handled quietly, within the walls, by the very people doing the harm.

Every time I had come close to telling someone, the answer, spoken or not, had been some version of that’s between you and your husband, and each time the door had swung shut a little more firmly, until I lived in a house that was, to the outside world, a sealed and private kingdom where Trent made the law.