So I founded an organization that took on domestic workers, whistleblowers, caregivers, women trapped in the private houses of powerful men — the exact category of person the law is written to protect and, in practice, most often fails.

Dalton called it my charity.

He said the word the way you would say a child’s lemonade stand.

I had let him.

That is the part I have had to sit with since.

For a year I had allowed a man to shrink me to a size that flattered him, and I had done it deliberately, the way you lower your voice in a house where someone is sleeping.