I might have expected that to feel like triumph.

It did not.

What it felt like was recognition — because I knew that fear from the inside, had lived in it for years.

The difference was in where the fear had come from.

Mine had been manufactured, installed in me on purpose by a man who profited from my believing I had nothing.

His was earned, the plain natural fear of a person meeting the results of his own choices.

And I understood, on my side of that door, that refusing him was not cruelty.