And I have come to understand that what she refused, in tearing it up, was not really the money at all — it was a redefinition of what had happened to her.

Because that settlement, for all its generosity, came with an unspoken clause buried inside the legal language: that in exchange for the money, my wife would agree to stop treating what happened to her as a crime, and start treating it as a dispute.

A crime has a perpetrator and a victim, and demands justice.

A dispute has two parties, and is resolved with money.

The Prescotts’ five million dollars was an offer to purchase, along with her silence, a fundamental relabeling of the truth — to convert an assault into a disagreement, a felony into a transaction, a wrong into a negotiation.