The banging on the door was Lorena, Craig’s sister, who lived a few miles off and treated her mother’s house — my house — as a place to sponge whatever she could.

She came in sweating through her makeup, demanding to know why I hadn’t sent the two hundred dollars she’d been promised for a shopping trip and why I wasn’t answering her calls, as though my money had always simply been hers.

Noreen told her the story — heavily edited, herself the victim, me the vindictive monster who’d struck her and then cut the power out of spite.

Lorena did not spend one second on whether her mother and brother had beaten me.

She exploded because the money had stopped.

“Why would you hit her and let her leave?” she shrieked.