But I will say this much about the way she told it, because it changed how I understood her, and how I would come to understand my whole life’s work.

She did not tell it like a victim.

She told it like a witness — carefully, in order, correcting herself when she got a date wrong, pausing to be sure she was being fair to the facts even about the man who had done this to her.

Somewhere in that terrible year and a half, this twenty-two-year-old had taught herself to observe her own suffering with the cold precision of someone building a case, long before she had any reason to believe a case would ever be possible.

She had photographed the screens.

She had kept the receipts.