What I witnessed was its opposite — a calm, sustained, collaborative decision to let me suffer while they weighed which version of events would best protect them.

The law has a name for it, which I would learn later: failure to summon aid.

It is its own crime, separate from the assault, and Sigrid pleaded guilty to it, and I was glad, because it named the specific thing I could not stop seeing when I closed my eyes.

Not the injury.

The wiping of the counter.

The long minutes when help was a choice they kept declining to make.