Round-the-clock care.

She’ll be so looked-after she’ll never have a reason to leave, and so gently managed that no one will listen to her if she tries.” I understood, lying there, that he was describing a cage, and that he had chosen its bars with genius: not walls, but concern.

Not a lock, but a diagnosis.

He would keep me the way you keep a delicate thing on a high shelf, out of the light, admired and useless, and he would call it love, and the whole world would call it devotion, and I would spend the rest of my life being cared for to death by a man who had decided my personhood was inconvenient to his brand.

I did not move.