I had braced myself, without quite realizing it, for the opposite — because Garrett had spent a year teaching me that no one would ever take my word over his, that I was the unstable one, the difficult one, the one who provoked and imagined and exaggerated.

He had built into me a certainty that if I ever tried to tell, I would not be believed, and that certainty had been one of the strongest bars of the cage, because a person who is sure she will not be believed does not bother to speak.

And then I spoke, in that hospital room, to two tired detectives who had no reason to favor me, and I watched them listen, and I watched them believe.

Not because I had proof yet — I hadn’t shown them anything yet — but because they had done this work long enough to know the shape of the truth when they heard it.