Abuse of this kind is not a thing that happens to weak women.

It is a thing that is done to ordinary women, by men who are experts at doing it, and the shame belongs entirely to the one doing it and not at all to the one it is done to.

I have finally made my peace with the woman I was.

She did the best she could inside a maze that someone else built specifically so that she could not find the exit.

And the moment a door cracked open at last — the moment my mother’s body pushed the truth onto a screen where I could not un-see it — that same woman walked through it and did not look back.

I am proud of her, in the end.