“If I had accepted his assessment,” he said, evenly, “there’s a real chance you would not have survived the night, and it would have been written up as one of those things that simply happen.”

A cold went through me that had nothing to do with blood loss.

I had not survived an accident.

I had survived a murder — one that had been arranged, and paid for, and very nearly finished inside the one building where I was supposed to be safe.

That was the detail that reorganized how I understood everything that followed: there had been no safe place.

Not my home, where my husband kept the knife.