Preparation is not the same as prediction.

I prepared for a fire I hoped would never come.”

Then she asked me what financial control had actually meant, in the daily texture of my life, given that I lived in a large home and enjoyed every apparent comfort.

And I gave the court the answer I had spent eleven months learning how to say.

“It meant that I had access to things,” I said, “without any control over whether I was allowed to keep them.

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