I could win Gaby every dollar and every square foot back, and I did, and she would still have woken at three in the morning certain she was worthless, because that certainty had been installed beneath the level that justice operates on.

The house came back the day the judge signed the order.

Gaby came back over the course of a year — through the therapy, through the small returning competencies, through eight thousand hard-earned dollars that meant more than the nine hundred thousand recovered, because the recovered money was justice and the earned money was healing.

If I could tell one thing to anyone helping someone they love climb out of an abuse like this, it would be this: pursue the justice, absolutely, with everything you have.

But do not mistake winning it for finishing the job.