Every time my brother-in-law drove me home, I would black out and wake up sore. My husband just laughed and said I was out of shape. After the fourth trip, I hid a voice recorder in my purse — and that night I heard a phone call that made me realize the blackouts had never been accidents.

It was a kind of horror with no shape to it at all.

The first version at least had a shape. You can hate a shape. You can give a shape to a police officer.

Because if that was not what they were doing —

then what on earth is worth doing that to your own brother’s wife, four times, in two years?

What do you need from a woman that badly, that you cannot get from her awake?

The second thing I did was ring a lawyer.

Not a divorce lawyer. Not anybody’s cousin.

A woman called Birgit Hanrahan, who does commercial fraud, who is about sixty, and who did work for my father in 2016 and again in 2019.

I played her the file in her own office on the Tuesday morning with the door shut and her telephone face down.

She listened to the whole of it twice. Eleven minutes each time, with her hands flat on the desk.