The sound of it went through him and his knees buckled, and the swaggering man of the day before was simply gone, replaced by what had always been underneath — a frightened boy calling for his mother as they walked him to the door.

And Noreen, seeing the cuffs, did not stage a fall this time.

She went down for real, onto her knees, grabbing at the detective, begging, turning to my parents to make me stop.

I watched her go down and felt the last thing I would ever feel about her, which was not triumph and not even anger but a kind of cold completeness.

For five years this woman had ruled me through a performance of her own suffering — the wounded elder, the sacrificing mother, the fall staged on a living-room floor.

Every scene had been a lever, and every lever had worked, because I had been willing to trade my own dignity for a few hours of quiet.