And here, under the hard light, was the opposite of fog: a machine measuring a fracture, a physician naming an injury in language with no opinion in it, a camera that recorded exactly what was there and nothing anyone wished were there instead.

No one in that room asked me whether I might have provoked it, or whether it was really as bad as I said, or whether family business ought to stay in the family.

They simply documented the truth of my body, precisely, and wrote it down in a form the world would have to believe.

After five years of being told my reality was wrong, being handed back an unarguable record of it was its own kind of medicine, and I think some part of me began to heal in that examination room before a single legal thing had happened at all.

Brendan laid it out.

“On the injuries alone, a lazy prosecutor charges this as a misdemeanor.