Watching her in that hotel room, I understood that getting her body somewhere safe had been the easy first step, and that the harder work, the real work, would be coaxing the person she used to be back out of the shell she had built to survive.

I called down and arranged for a nurse to come up and look at her knees, which were worse than she had admitted, swollen and bruised from months of kneeling on stone.

And slowly, in that warm quiet room, I watched some of the fear go out of her shoulders, watched her begin, by inches, to believe that she was safe.

When she was finally resting, propped up in the big soft bed with the television murmuring low, I stepped out into the hallway and pulled the door almost shut behind me, and I made one phone call.