With my free hand I reached onto the counter, grabbed my phone, and hit the voice recorder.

“Repeat the manifesto, Tommy,” I said. “A woman needs to know her place. Was that it? Who taught you this philosophy?”

“You… you psycho—” He tried to buck me off and got exactly nowhere. The arm didn’t move. Neither did he.

I let him feel that. Not pain — physics. The absolute, arithmetic certainty that every ounce of strength he’d been counting on his whole life had just stopped being relevant.

“The microphone’s rolling,” I said, holding the screen near his sweating face. “Who told you to beat your wife?”

He held out for a while. But bullies are cowards with a script, and I had taken the script away. What broke him wasn’t his shoulder. It was the math — the dawning understanding that he was pinned to the floor of his own dining room by a woman he’d just tried to kill with a chair, and that there was no version of the next five minutes where he won.