A line drawn here, a door closed there, until one evening you find you are keeping your own thoughts under the furniture.

The cruelest part is how reasonable each step seems from inside it.

I could have told you, that night on the green sofa, a dozen sensible reasons why I had stopped speaking freely, and every one of them would have been a small accommodation I had chosen, a kindness I had extended to a man under pressure, a battle I had decided was not worth fighting.

Only when you lay all the accommodations end to end do you see that they are not a series of kindnesses at all.