I stood there, bleeding at the mouth, feeling no panic and no pity, only a strange clarity — and then I heard the smart lock click, and the front door opened, and my husband walked in.

Chapter 3 — What the Report Would Say

I will not narrate what Craig did when he came through that door.

I could — I remember all of it — but there is a document that describes it far more precisely than I ever could, prepared later that day by a trauma physician under fluorescent light, and I would rather let that document speak, because it speaks in a language a courtroom understands and because I am done giving that afternoon any more of my words than it deserves.

So I will tell you only the facts, the way the report tells them.

Craig came in to find his mother on the floor among the broken crystal and me standing with a split lip, and his mother pointed at me and cried that I had attacked her — leaving out, of course, that she had struck first — and told her son to teach me a lesson.