She flipped through the blank pages. Her hands looked chapped and raw, ten years older than her smooth, round-cheeked face. “My ex denies everything. He gaslights me—makes me think I’m the crazy one, out to get him and imagining things. I’ve tried to tell people—friends and family—but I can’t manage to convey the situation and they think I’m crazy, too. Some days I still question myself. He’s successful, beloved by everyone who meets him. He’s influential. Upstanding. Everything you think of when you think of a guy who runs a major hospital.”

She turned to the calendar section of the planner and studied the grid for a moment. “I got a lot of bad advice from well-meaning people. My pastor suggested ways to mollify my husband, soften his anger. One friend said I should get better at sex.”

A loud snort burst from Amy.

“Exactly. So I’m here in the hopes of finding someone who gets it.” She looked around nervously; then her gaze darted to the floor. “I think—I hope—I might have found it.”

Caroline grabbed Sierra’s hand. They looked at each other and held on tight.

“I had to get a protective order as I was in the process of leaving,” Willow continued, “and there was more gaslighting, even from the judge, because I simply couldn’t explain what emotional abuse feels like. I was depressed, probably still am, but I can’t afford to treat it. My self-confidence is in the dirt. The only job I dared to take was with a hotel laundry service. I don’t know if I’ll ever find my way back to who I was.” She smoothed her reddened hand over the pages. “And I was somebody. A justice of the peace—can you believe it? Ironically, I’m authorized to perform marriages. I had other skills, too. I’m a business analyst and a patent lawyer. I wrote business plans for multimillion-dollar corporations and start-ups on a shoestring.”

Caroline couldn’t believe her ears. A lawyer. A judge. And now the woman was a hotel laundry worker?

Willow must have caught her expression. “Just because I’m educated doesn’t mean I had some special warning that the charming, successful man I’d married was secretly a monster. My law degree didn’t make me immune to the things that went on behind closed doors.”

She snapped the book shut. “As the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” She looked around the circle. “So you’re my first step.”

Caroline didn’t move a muscle. She felt heartsick and frustrated by the stories she was hearing. The losses caused by abuse mounted. Hearing the women speak was humbling. They came from every sort of diverse background, every stratum of society. The one common thread was that each had suffered at the hands of an intimate partner. A husband. A boyfriend. A girlfriend.

Economic hardship was part of nearly everyone’s story. Women shackled themselves to abusers in order to survive, and they stayed trapped there, sometimes for years. Most people didn’t have parents like Caroline’s, offering a safe haven.

She had lived her life taking independence for granted. Now that she had children to look after, she could understand the compromises women were sometimes forced to make. She wanted to create something so successful that she could afford full-time help from Echo. And hiring Echo was only a small step. Caroline needed a bigger plan. She vowed to expand her business beyond superhero T-shirts. She wanted to create more opportunities for more women. Like Amy. Caroline was already paying a commercial driver to take her bagged and tagged garments to Seattle and Portland. Why not Amy, who loved to drive? And if the income stream ever permitted it, she’d hire Willow in a heartbeat, to help with the business side of things. Caroline knew design. Patternmaking and sample sewing, fit and sourcing. The business structure—not so much.

The latecomer named Ilsa rifled through the basket. “I don’t see anything in here for me,” she said. “I’m not even sure I belong in a group like this. I’ve never been married, haven’t been in a long-term relationship. I’m here because I had . . .” Setting down the basket, she kept her eyes trained on the floor. “I don’t even know what to call what happened to me. A bad date? A bad encounter?”

She absently rubbed the side of her neck with her hand. To Caroline, she looked very young, barely out of her teens. “It was a guy I’d just met for drinks, and he seemed kind of cute. I’m a web designer, and he was interested in my work. Good profile on a dating app. I was a little drunk,” Ilsa went on. “I shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, but I was in no shape to drive. He offered to take me home. Then he wanted to make out, so we did that for a while, but I really wanted to go home. And . . . and he started forcing me, and I’m like, no, but it wasn’t really a hard no. I didn’t want to be awkward or dramatic. And he’s like, ‘Oh, you want it rough,’ and he yanked off my blouse and tried to force me.”

The young woman’s words ignited a deep sense of outrage in Caroline, awakening an old but never-quite-forgotten memory. She didn’t move, but felt her hands curl into fists.

“I—he . . . Somehow I managed to wriggle free. I shoved the door open and literally fell on the ground in the parking lot. Then I ran like hell to my own car. I don’t even remember getting in. I remember him peeling out of the parking lot. I just sat there in my car with all the doors locked, shaking. Shaking so hard I thought my teeth would fall out. Finally I managed to get the key in the ignition. By then I was stone-cold sober. I’m sure I was in shock. God, it happened so fast . . .”

These things can catch you off guard, thought Caroline, feeling a prickle at the back of her neck.

“I should be grateful that I managed to get away,” Ilsa said. “And I figured, that’s that. It’s over. It was a bad moment. I’m just going to forget it happened and move on.”

Finally she looked up from the floor. “I can’t forget. The whole incident took up maybe five minutes of my life, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I go over and over it in my mind. Was I stupid to have one too many? Idiotic to get in his car? Was my skirt too short? My blouse too tight? Then I wonder if I should tell someone—my mom, a friend. But I couldn’t bring myself to speak up. This is the first time I’ve said a single word about it. And here’s the kicker. He keeps texting me, trying to get me to go out with him again. He’s acting like we had a good time. He even sent me a dick pic. So I guess . . .” She hunched her shoulders. Rubbed her neck again. “That’s why I’m not sure about being here.” She stared down at her hands, picked at her nails. “Like, was I abused? Was it a sexual assault? Or just a really bad date?”

You were assaulted, Caroline told her with silent, fierce certainty. That’s an absolute fact. She could scarcely imagine the trauma the girl must have felt. Except . . . maybe she could. A long-buried incident, never quite forgotten, nudged its way up from the past. The smell of salt water on his skin, Jägermeister on his breath. The weight of him, pinning her on the blanket. His husky voice in her ear. That, too, had been the briefest of encounters, but years later, it was burned into her memory. She was surprised by the vehemence she felt all the way down to the bottom of her gut. Now she realized that if the intimacy didn’t feel right, it probably wasn’t right.