This is the thing no one tells you about a gilded cage: that the hardest bars to see are not the ones your captor installs, but the ones you install yourself, out of fear, and habit, and the terror of the unknown on the other side.

Julian took my career and my income.

But it was I who mistook the loss of them for the loss of all my options, I who did not try the door for years, I who kept making his favorite dinner long after some clear-eyed part of me had started saving for the escape.

I am not saying this to take his cruelty onto myself; the cruelty was his.

I am saying it because it is the truth, and because the truth is where my freedom actually came from.

The day I ceased believing I was trapped, I discovered I never entirely had been.