And when it was over, she tossed my own car keys onto the island and looked at what she had done and said the six words that would, months later, help end her.

“Look what you made me do.”

I did not know, in that moment, that my phone was recording.

I had started it, without quite deciding to, when she first raised her voice in the hallway — an old professional instinct, the instinct of a person trained to preserve a record when a situation begins to feel wrong.

That instinct was about to save my life, or at least the shape of it.

I have been asked, since, whether I feel strange about the fact that I recorded it — whether there is something cold, or calculating, or even dishonest, about a woman whose phone was capturing audio while she was being assaulted.