Dr.

Stanfield narrated his findings for the documentation system in clinical, unhurried language — the trauma to the cheekbone, the laceration to the lip that needed closing, the bruising along the ribs consistent with a heavy impact.

When my lip had been cleaned and sutured and dressed, they brought me out to a quiet room where my father and Brendan were bent over a growing stack of paper.

There was something clarifying about that process, cold as it was.

For five years my reality had been a contested thing — Noreen’s version against mine, endlessly, with Craig always ruling for his mother and me always somehow the one in the wrong.

I had lived so long in the fog of their revisions that I had half stopped trusting my own account of my own life.