I did not have to.

Cruelty writes its own invoices; it only takes the world a while to deliver them.

All I had done was stop being the person who kept paying their share for them.

For thirty-two years I had absorbed the cost of my family’s fear so that they would never have to feel it, standing in the corner they assigned me, being the failure they needed so that they could go on believing they were a success.

When I stepped out of that ballroom on my husband’s arm, I set that cost down.