The fourth year — after the fire, after Gwendolyn had my pendant and my rescue and my six years — I did not tell him because telling him then would have meant admitting I had already been hiding for four years, and there is no version of that conversation that does not go badly.

“And by the time I was pregnant with you,” I said, “the phone in my bag had stopped being a way out. It was proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“That I could leave whenever I wanted.” I made myself keep going. “Phoebe, that phone let me stay. Every time it got bad, I would think: I could end this in one call.

And then I wouldn’t make the call, and I would feel like I had chosen, which felt like power, and it wasn’t. It was the thing that let me tolerate another year.

Eleven times. I can name the eleven.”