What the account held was a fact about myself I could carry into the marriage and keep there, folded and dry: that I was a person who could still leave.

A woman who can leave is a different woman inside a marriage than a woman who cannot, even if she never uses the door, even if she stays forty happy years.

My mother had not given me an escape route.

She had given me a spine, and disguised it as a savings account, and trusted me to find out someday which one it really was.

And then Brandon changed the code on the front door, and my mother’s grim, old-fashioned, needlessly cautious advice reached across eight years and paid, in full, for the security deposit and the first month’s rent on a home with a door that only I could open.