He had confused the two so completely that he could not tell them apart any longer.

In his mind, because I could not easily afford to leave, I would not leave; because I needed his money, I was, functionally, his.

He had reduced me, in his own understanding, to an economic unit — a person whose behavior could be predicted from her financial incentives, the way you might predict the movement of a stock.

And people are not stocks.

That was his error, and it is the error of every person who tries to own another human being through their circumstances: they forget that a human being is not only a set of incentives, but a soul, with a breaking point, and a memory, and a capacity — dormant, perhaps, for years, but never destroyed — to decide that some things are worth more than comfort and safety and the path of least resistance.

Brandon had spent nine years successfully predicting me from my dependence, and it made him lazy, and certain, and finally blind, because he stopped believing there was anything in me his model could not account for.