so difficult to evaluate in the moment, but crystal-clear in hindsight—which is to say that this is precisely what domestic violence looks like. Paul is hardly alone in his failure to register the portent of it. But imagine it’s not Rocky at Paul’s front door, beating at it, kicking it, screaming for a woman inside. Imagine it’s a stranger. Who wouldn’t call the police? Who wouldn’t try to intervene to stop the violence? And yet when it comes to people we know, people we see in other contexts—as fathers, brothers, sons, cousins, mothers, whatever—we have trouble registering the violence.
