She had spent a year and a half being told, in a hundred small ways, that she was powerless — that her voice did not carry, that no one would believe her over a man like Dalton, that people in her position learned to lower their heads and take what they were given.

She stood in that conference room in front of the man who had taught her all of it, and his mother, and their lawyers, and she was afraid; I could see the fear moving in her hands.

But she looked at Dalton, and her voice shook and did not break, and she said: “No.

People like you only believe we will.”

I have thought about that sentence more than almost anything else from those weeks, because in six words she named the entire mechanism I had spent my career fighting.

Men like Dalton do not actually hold the power they appear to hold.