I want you to sit with that image, because I have.

A grown woman, hiding her own car keys in a grocery bag, in her own home, so that her husband would not stop her from taking her sick mother to a doctor.

That is not a marriage.

I did not have the word for it yet, that morning — I would learn the words later, from detectives and counselors and my own mother’s whispered confessions — but the body knows things the mind refuses, and my body knew, hiding those keys, exactly what kind of house I was living in.

I drove to my mother’s house.

She was sitting in her armchair, a knitted cardigan draped over her shoulders, her face drawn and gray.