There would have been a police report with my name in the wrong column.

My own security cameras, which had just recorded her striking an unresisting woman who did nothing but stand still, would instead have recorded me delivering blows to someone twenty-five years my senior.

Every legal advantage I held — and I held all of them — would have evaporated in the instant my hand made contact, and I would have handed my mother-in-law the one thing she could not otherwise get: a grievance of her own, a bruise to photograph, a way to make herself the victim.

So I kept my hands down.

Not because I am a saint, and not because I did not want to hit her — I have been honest that I wanted to.

I kept my hands down because I am not a fool, and because I understood, even in the heat of it, that her violence was not a threat to me but a gift to me, provided I did not squander it by answering in kind.