“You stopped being my husband,” I said, and my voice was level, “the moment your fist landed.

After that you were just a man who assaulted someone in a house she paid for.

And that’s a police matter.”

He kept talking as the officers moved in — that it was a private matter, that I was overreacting, that no one calls the law on family.

It was the same argument he and his mother had used against me for five years, the argument that private cruelty is nobody’s business, that what happens inside a house stays inside it, that a wife’s job is to absorb and stay quiet.

It had worked on me for a long time.