“In that case,” I said quietly, “we are not making anything disappear.

We are doing the exact opposite.

We are going to make thirty-two years of it impossible to ignore.”

I could not stop thinking, in that waiting room, about the arithmetic of thirty-two years — because a number like that, said aloud in a hospital, stops being an abstraction and becomes a life.

Thirty-two years is not an incident.

It is not a bad patch, or a rough marriage, or a difficult man.

Thirty-two years is more than eleven thousand nights, each one spent by a woman lying beside the person most likely to hurt her, never knowing which nights would be safe.