But she did not come out.

She did not put herself between me and the door.

She did not say wait, or stop, or where will you go.

She stood behind that thin mesh screen and she wept and she let it happen, and in some ways the memory of her standing there, close enough to touch and utterly unreachable, would hurt worse over the years than my father’s shouting had.

I understood my father’s part of that night, eventually.