Nearly all of our household spending ran through a card that he controlled and I merely used.

Whenever I raised the idea of going back to work, he would remind me, gently, that his income was more than sufficient and that our children needed their mother at home.

And whenever I questioned something on an account statement, he would smile at me, patiently, and explain that I had been away from the world of finance for too long now to really understand the complexities of modern business accounting.

This is the thing I would later have to explain to a courtroom, and it is the thing people who have not lived it find hardest to grasp: that you can be surrounded by expensive things and still be profoundly unfree.

Because there is a vast difference — a difference I would eventually name out loud on a witness stand — between having access to things and having control over whether you are allowed to keep them.

I had a car, until the day he reminded me it was his company’s.