But because the woman who has kept her own records and her own account and her own door is a woman who can always, if she ever has to, save herself without asking anyone’s permission.

I was teaching them, I realized one afternoon, just what my grandmother had left to me.

I was passing on the key.

And I have come to think that this work — the quiet, unglamorous, deeply practical work of teaching frightened women to keep their own records and hold their own accounts and secure their own doors — is the truest justice that came out of everything that happened to me, truer than any conviction.

Because the convictions punished the people who hurt me, and that mattered, but punishment is backward-looking; it addresses a harm already done.