When he tried, later, to enter the apartment that was now legally mine, he was met at the door by sheriff’s deputies enforcing the emergency protective order.

Everywhere he turned that night, he found a wall that I had built, in advance, out of nothing but evidence and the correct paperwork.

He had spent the day discovering, one locked door at a time, that the quiet wife he had told to apologize had become, overnight, the most organized problem of his entire life.

There is a lesson in those locked doors that I have carried into my work ever since, and that I give, in one form or another, to every frightened woman who sits across my desk.

Luca spent that entire evening running from one barrier to the next — the hotel security, the apartment deputies, the frozen accounts, the served warrant — and at each one he reacted with the same disbelieving fury, as though the barrier had appeared by malice or bad luck.