So I kept buying them peace with gifts, and every gift taught them they could take more.

Finding my mother over that stove was the thing that finally cost more than the fear.

I think about that fear a lot now, because it is the thing that keeps women in houses like the one I left, and it is almost never the fear people assume.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to go — I could afford to go more easily than almost anyone, which is its own strange trap, because it stripped away every practical excuse and left me alone with the real ones.

The real fear was smaller and more embarrassing than money.

It was the fear of being the woman whose marriage failed.