I have thought a great deal about Tanya Eastman in the months since that afternoon. About the fact that she noticed what she noticed, that she documented what she documented, that she did not dismiss the thing that did not fit. About the anonymous person at Leo’s party who looked at me on that driveway and decided to call 911 despite everything Leo had spent months building, the consensus, the story, the coordinated portrait of a woman who could not be trusted to accurately report her own experience.
About my grandmother, who told me when I was nineteen that every woman should have money that belongs to her alone in a place nobody else can touch, and who probably could not have known, when she said it, how exactly those words would function twenty-three years later in a small hospital room where a billing coordinator paid two hundred and eighty-five dollars of her own cash to see a doctor her husband had made sure she could not reach any other way.
