He had watched me be patient for years — patient with the allowance, patient with the late nights, patient with the coldness and the condescension — and he had filed all of that patience under weakness.

He had decided that a woman who did not fight back could not fight back.

It never once occurred to him that some patience is not the absence of power but the storing of it; that a woman can be quiet for years not because she has no teeth, but because she is waiting to see the whole board before she moves a single piece.

This is the thing I would most want understood, if my story is going to be of any use to anyone: that my silence in those years was not the same as consent, and it was not the same as defeat, even though from the outside it looked like both, and even though, on the worst days, it felt like both to me too.