What could she have done, Jenna wondered guiltily. She couldn’t tell her son that if there was anything she dreaded, it was being in a room full of specialists on her alleged country of birth. She couldn’t tell him that Professor Hamid’s unctuous flirtations made her skin crawl. And she most certainly couldn’t tell him that she heartily disliked Jacqueline’s air of superiority and almost everything else about her. Almost everything. At least the girl didn’t use drugs, and she didn’t appear to be sexually precocious. To the contrary, Jenna observed, she apparently had a zealot’s aversion to the pleasures of the flesh. And heaven knows, she was politically correct.

To assuage her guilt over the white lie about work, Jenna called Toni Ferrante to ask how she was doing.

“I had brunch with the boys on Sunday,” Toni reported. “They’re still living with their father, but they said they’d spend the weekend with me.”

One for the good guys, Jenna thought. Maybe Toni’s years of suffering and self-doubt were, at last, leading to a positive outcome. Jenna felt a satisfaction that was as much personal as professional, for she had really come to care for Toni.

There was one genuine piece of work to do—keying in and printing out a grant proposal she had prepared on behalf of the Sanctuary. Jenna had labored long and hard on her plea for funds. She considered her work at the shelter as important as anything she’d ever done.

She had never ceased to wonder how many American women—often capable, talented, otherwise independent women—suffered abuse in their personal lives. She felt an ongoing frustration at this dark, dirty little secret that so many women carried alone for so long, the shame they suffered, the feeling that the abuse was their fault—and somehow even deserved. What made Jenna’s work harder was the lack of empathy and compassion. Even professionals in other fields would ask, “Why don’t these women just leave? What’s wrong with them? Why do they stay with men who beat them?”

There were so many answers, Jenna tried to explain. Fear of the unknown. Fear of enraging the violence-prone spouse. Low self-esteem. A sense that there was no place to go. And in the end, sometimes there were no easy answers at all. Because while there were women who stayed and stayed, beyond daily abuse until their own deaths, there were others who left. Some came to the Sanctuary or a thousand other places like it. Some simply ran, as Jenna had done, with no idea where their stories would end.

When the doorbell rang, she assumed it was Karim, habitually forgetful of his keys.

It was Laila.

“Hi,” the girl—the young woman—said, as if it had been only yesterday that they’d parted in front of the Plaza.