Julian was a man who had called my mother a servant to my face and shut a door on me, and then, cornered, had smiled at me because he thought I was too foolish to fight him.

I owed that man nothing, least of all a heads-up.

I owed that man only nine o’clock, and I intended to be precisely on time.

I have wondered, occasionally, whether that makes me cold, the fact that I let him spend those hours in false comfort rather than warning him, and I have decided that it does not.

A warning is a kindness you extend to someone who might use it to do better, to reconsider, to make a different choice.

Julian had already made his choices, thousands of them, across two years, each one a small decision to take a little more from a woman who could not stop him.