She did not shout.

She was not out of control.

She said it the way you might set a condition on a child’s dessert.

And that composure, that total absence of any flicker of shame, told me something I had spent nine years refusing to know: that this was not a heated moment.

This was a plan, and it had been a plan for a long time.

I have thought a great deal, since, about that particular kind of composure, because it is the thing that haunts me more than the pain did, and because I think it is the thing most people misunderstand about how the worst harms actually get done.