When I linked my father’s cameras to that server, I was not preparing for my husband to try to kill me; the thought never crossed my mind.

I did it out of habit — my father’s habit, planted in me over years.

And that habit, that reflex of the careful, that unglamorous discipline of keeping some record beyond anyone’s reach, is the thing that stood between my daughter and a lifetime with the man who tried to kill her mother.

So this is what I teach the women who come to my clinic now, first of all, the way my father taught me: keep copies.

Not because everyone you love will betray you.