Because a house where something terrible happened holds the terrible thing, in a way, as long as it stays what it was; the room keeps the memory, the walls keep the echo, and to keep such a house, or to sell it to strangers who would host their dinner parties in the room where I was hurt, or even to destroy it and leave a scar of empty ground, would all have been ways of letting the terrible thing remain the truest thing about the place.

Conversion was different.

To take the exact ballroom where a man had bound and hurt his wife for an audience, and turn it into a place where hurt wives come to be safe and helped and made whole — to fund that transformation with the very money he had stolen to betray me — was not to erase what had happened there.

It was to defeat it.