And by the time you understand that the careful household finances were actually the bars of a cage, you have usually been inside it so long that you can no longer quite remember how the door works, or whether you were ever allowed to touch it.

Richard had spent years teaching me that my access to my own life ran through his permission.

What he did not know was that my mother had spent those same years learning to pick the lock.

Chapter 4 — The Grocery Bag

The next morning, I waited for Richard to leave for his corporate office.

And then I did something that told me, in itself, everything about the marriage I was in: I hid my own purse, my own credit cards, and my own car keys inside a reusable grocery bag, so that my husband would not suspect that I intended to leave the house and use my own money on my own mother.