Rich people fear embarrassment, she reasoned; the family would be so mortified in front of their neighbors that they would force me to turn everything back on and pay them off to go away.

Noreen’s eyes lit up at that.

And so, in the building morning heat, three people with no leverage and a bottomless supply of nerve piled into a car and headed for the one place they should never have gone.

I have thought about that decision — the drive to my parents’ house — as the single clearest window into how these people’s minds actually worked.

Consider what they knew.

They knew Craig had beaten me badly enough to send me fleeing.