I want to record her words exactly, not because they deserve repeating, but because Hannah stood a few feet away and heard them, and I will not pretend they were gentler than they were.

But I also want to be clear about why I am setting them down at all, because I have no interest in simply cataloguing one woman’s ugliness for its own sake.

I record Brenda’s words because my daughter heard them, and because the single most important thing I could do, in the aftermath, was to make sure that Hannah understood, completely and permanently, that those words were false.

A museum.