That version would have felt wonderful for about a week.

And then it would have rotted, because it would not have been justice.

It would have been power answering power’s insult, one rich man reaching down to swat a man who had struck what belonged to him — and in that version, I am not a person at all.

I am property that got defended.

I refused to be that.

I had been treated as an object for six years, first a decoration and then a burden and finally a thing to be beaten and thrown out, and I was not going to end my own story by becoming an object one more time, even a well-avenged one.

So I walked into an ordinary clinic and let ordinary professionals do the careful, unglamorous work of documenting the truth, and I filed with the ordinary police, and I made the crime against me a matter of law before it was ever a matter of my family’s reach.