For a long time I believed that little crack was a lucky accident that saved my life.

I don’t believe that anymore.

The crack didn’t save me.

All it did was give me a few terrible minutes to lie still in the dark and hear, with no one performing for me and no way to look away, the unvarnished truth about my own life.

What saved me was what I did with it — that I stopped, at last, making excuses for the evil I could plainly hear.

Because there are so many women who do not live in a wooden box, and who still spend years lying very still, pretending not to hear the insults and the lies and the quiet betrayals happening inches from their faces.