He always did the coats.

“And he had never hit me before that day. Four years of everything else and he had never once put a hand on me, and I want you to understand what a phone in a lining meant to a man like that.

It didn’t mean I’d been talking to someone. It meant I had a plan.”

I could not say anything.

“I was in the hospital for two days. I said I fell off a ladder at the shop and they wrote it down.” Clara’s voice was completely level. “And then I stayed eleven more months, because after that I had no phone and no bag and no shelter number, because he found all of it at once, in one afternoon, because it was all in one place.”

“Clara—”