“Because nobody comes when I say no there.”

I want to write down what the first month was actually like, hour by hour, because every account of this kind of thing skips from the escape to the outcome, and the skipped part is where almost everybody who gives up gives up.

I did not go back to work for eleven days and I did not have eleven days of leave.

In those eleven days there were: two appointments at the urgent care for follow-up on her hands, one forensic interview, two home visits from Renata Alvarado, three meetings with Naomi, one emergency hearing for the order for protection at which I sat eleven feet from Raymond Voss in a corridor for twenty minutes because there was nowhere else to sit, four calls with an advocate, and one appointment at a bank to open an account in my own name that nobody else had ever seen.

None of that is billable and all of it is on a weekday.

I had four hundred and eleven dollars in a personal account and a joint account I was afraid to touch because Naomi had told me not to move money until we had a picture, and the picture took nine days.