“Because that food,” I said slowly, the whole shape of the next few minutes assembling itself in my mind as I stared at it, “is the only proof of what he just did to us.” I understood, with a clarity that surprised me even then, just how this would go if I did nothing.

He would come back.

He would clean.

And when help finally came, if it ever came, there would be his word — calm, reasonable, grieving — against a story no one could check, and he would say we had taken something, or eaten something, or done this to ourselves.

Unless there was a piece of that dinner left in the world that he did not control.

I could not let him have all of it.