The others changed the scale of it.

Here were two women who had endured versions of the same year and a half, who had left carrying it in silence, who had assumed — exactly as Catalina had been trained to assume — that nothing could be done and no one would believe them, and who had therefore said nothing, for years, while the man moved on to the next house and the next frightened employee.

That is how these systems perpetuate themselves: not only through the abuser, but through the silence he manufactures in everyone he leaves behind.

Each woman’s isolation had protected him from the next woman’s claim.

And the thing that finally broke the chain was not a heroic confrontation.

It was a public record — one case, documented and visible, that told the others they were not alone and not crazy and not without recourse.