Because when a man controls all the money, he controls whether your mother sees a doctor.

He controls whether you can afford to leave.

He controls, in the end, the entire physical possibility of your independence, and he gets to do it while looking, to the outside world and even to you, like a prudent and caring husband rather than a jailer.

That is the genius of financial control, and it is why it is so often the quiet foundation beneath every louder kind of abuse: it does not look like abuse.

It looks like budgeting.

It looks like a man taking care of his family.