What the legal-aid work does is forward-looking.

Every woman I sit down with, every account number I help her track, every deed I help her copy, every independent account I help her open, is a small piece of a door being built before it is needed, a key being cut before the day she has to run.

I cannot undo what was done to me.

But I can make sure that some other woman, somewhere, on the worst night of her life, reaches for the handle of a door and finds, to her own surprise, that it opens — because months or years earlier, a forensic accountant sat at her kitchen table and taught her, without drama, how to make sure she would always be able to save herself.

That is my grandmother’s gift, multiplied.