By that evening a doctor had examined her, and the report was its own quiet indictment: severe malnutrition, injuries both old and new, and fractures that had been left to heal on their own, crooked, without ever seeing a doctor.

I will not catalogue it further than that, because a medical file is the right and only place for such details to live — dated, measured, witnessed, turned from suffering into evidence.

That is what a report does, and it is why I asked for one before I did anything else: not to relive what had been done to Natasha, but to make it into the one thing that could not be argued away later by expensive men in a courtroom.

While she slept under a hospital blanket, clean and safe for the first time in longer than I could bear to think about, my phone rang, and it was Brock, and his voice had gone cold and careful.