Having the Keys Doesn’t Mean You Own It

But I meant it as more than a threat about a deed.

I meant it about all of it.

He had held the keys to a marriage for twelve years and never once grasped that a marriage is not a thing you take title to; it is a thing given to you, day after day, by a person who could choose to stop.

He’d had the keys to my whole heart and driven around town telling people he’d built the car.

And the trouble with a man who confuses the keys with ownership is that it never occurs to him the owner might, one ordinary morning, take her property back and go.