Because his threat was not really a threat to do something.

It was a threat to define something — to define me, publicly, as unwell and bitter and unreliable, and to make that definition stick.

And I realized, standing there shaking, that this was the only weapon he had ever truly had over me: not force, not money, but the power to author the story of who I was.

For five years I had let him hold that pen, had accepted his version of me as the real one, had believed I was safe only inside the identity he wrote for me.

And a threat to control the story only works on a person who has agreed that the story-teller gets to decide the truth.