Every single act of the cage was performed in the vocabulary of love, and that is what made the cage so nearly perfect, because to name it, I would have to sound ungrateful — to stand in a large house, holding the keys to a luxury car, and claim I was not free, when a thousand women would have envied everything I had.

That is the trap inside the trap.

The comfort is not incidental to the control; the comfort is the control’s disguise, and its alibi, and its lock.

For years it worked on me the way it was designed to, because I kept measuring my situation by what I had, and what I had was lovely, and so I concluded I could not possibly be imprisoned.

It took me far too long to understand that the question was never what I had.

The question was whether any of it was truly mine, or whether all of it, down to the phone in my hand, might be taken back the instant I became inconvenient.