I say this deliberately, for any young person who might read it and think they could never be as brave as the girl in the story: you do not have to be brave.

I was not brave.

I was cornered, and frightened, and I simply found the one thing that could not be taken from me and held onto it.

That is not heroism.

It is survival, thinking clearly under pressure.

And it is available to people who do not feel brave at all, which is most of us, which was certainly me — a terrified seventeen-year-old who did not fight her abuser, and did not confront him, and did not do anything the movies would call courageous, but who found a broken phone in an attic and understood, in her fear, exactly what it was worth.

Chapter 5 — What Our Father Left Us