It was in a language he did not speak.

He offered we could adopt later the way a man might offer to replace a broken thing with an equivalent, not comprehending that the break itself was the crime, that no replacement could repair a violation of consent, that she was not grieving a missing child but a stolen sovereignty.

She looked at him across that table and understood that she was not talking to a repentant man.

She was talking to a man who had never once conceived that her body was hers, and who was therefore, in the deepest sense, incapable of understanding why what he’d done was wrong.

There was a strange freedom in seeing it clearly.

She stopped needing him to understand.