They had come expecting a domestic squabble and found a woman in a cast beside the evidence of a false report, and they left with a record of their own.

I asked the nurse for a full copy of my chart.

Chapter 4 — Four Calls

Then I made four calls, and I want to be honest that I made them without drama, the way you’d move pieces you’d been holding a long time.

There was no rage in it, which people find hard to believe when I tell the story.

Rage would have been a kind of hope — it would have meant I still wanted something from him, an apology, a reckoning, a version of him that could be shamed into decency.