“BRENDA!

Get out here right now!”

My mother began to shake, a fine helpless tremor running through her from head to foot, the exact response he had spent months training into her, the freeze of a person who has learned that her husband’s anger is a weather she cannot survive by standing up in it.

Watching that tremor was one of the hardest moments of the whole ordeal for me, harder in some ways than anything that came after, because it showed me so plainly what he had done to her.

But it also settled something in me.