I had kept my hands clean in that banquet room precisely so that this morning, at this station, they would be free to do the only kind of fighting that would actually keep my daughter safe.

There is a lesson in that sequence that I did not fully understand until I lived it, about the difference between appeasement and accountability, and about why the first fails and the second works.

For two years I had practiced appeasement, though I did not call it that; I called it keeping the peace, being the bigger person, holding the family together.

And appeasement operates on a hopeful theory: that if you absorb enough of a cruel person’s cruelty without complaint, they will eventually be satisfied, or moved, or shamed into stopping.