And I think that is the part people least want to understand about how these things persist: that the men who do the harm are very often surrounded and sustained not by other men but by women who have decided that the family’s standing is worth more than the safety of whichever woman is currently inconvenient.

Constance had made that trade eight years before I ever arrived, with Sarah Pruitt, and she had been fully prepared to make it again, with me, and she would have, if I had come to her the way Sarah did — trusting, wounded, alone.

I did not come to her that way.

I came to her with a copy of the check she’d signed.

That was the difference between Sarah’s story and mine, and it was the only difference: not that I was stronger or smarter or more deserving, but that I had gotten to the evidence before the family’s machinery could get to me.