The trap is built out of your own good qualities.
Your patience, your loyalty, your willingness to sacrifice, your reluctance to make a scene: these are not the flaws that keep you trapped.
They are virtues, turned into a cage by people who knew how to exploit them.
I did not stay for ten years because I was weak or blind.
I stayed because I was loyal and patient and kind, and those were exactly the tools they used to build the walls.
Understanding that let me forgive the woman I had been.
She was not a fool.
She was a good person, in the hands of people who knew precisely how to turn her goodness into a weapon.
And the day I understood that, I stopped being ashamed of her, and started, simply, being free of them.
Chapter 3 — Permission to Save Yourself
The thing that finally cracked the ten years open was money, as it so often is — specifically, my grandmother’s money.
My grandmother had died three months earlier, and she had left me an investment portfolio worth three point eight million dollars, the fruit of an entire lifetime of careful, patient, unglamorous saving.
