Wendy fought harder, at first.

Her legal team tried to reframe the assault as a “mutual domestic dispute” — that oldest and ugliest of maneuvers, the one that tries to make a victim into a co-combatant.

But there is no arguing with an airtight record.

When Detective Miller presented the emergency-room photographs, and my forensic medical reports, and above all the kitchen audio in which Wendy could be heard, in her own voice, sneering look what you made me do, the mutual-dispute theory simply collapsed.

You cannot claim a fight was mutual when the recording captures only one person’s fists and the other person’s pain.