Each concession was small.

Each was defensible.

Each was, in isolation, the choice a loving partner might make.

And that is exactly how it works, how a person is slowly erased: not through any single unbearable demand that she might have refused, but through an endless series of small, reasonable, individually-bearable ones, each of which lowers the floor a little further, until one day she is living in a basement she cannot remember descending into.

I never chose to disappear.