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.

She was paid. It is in her own accounts. Four payments, over two years, and the fourth one is the largest.

But there is one thing in her journal that is going to sit in me for the rest of my life.

On the fourth of December — the third appointment — there is a note in her own handwriting in the margin.

It says: signer unwell — husband assisted — proceeded.

Six words and two dashes.

She wrote it down.

A commissioned officer of this state looked at a thirty-eight-year-old woman who could not hold her own head up in a chair.

She noticed. She recorded the fact that she had noticed, in ink, in a bound journal with numbered pages.

And then she proceeded.

And the reason that entry sits in me, at two in the morning, is not what that woman did.

It is that it is the same sentence as mine.