And I want to be honest about why, because it is a trap that a great many capable women fall into: I did it out of love, or what I thought was love, out of a desire to be accepted, to belong to a family, to not threaten the fragile egos around me, to be the kind of wife who caused no trouble.

I dimmed myself to fit into their world, and I called the dimming devotion.

And the terrible irony, the thing I understood sitting in that Phuket lounge, was that the very self I had spent years hiding to please them was the self that was now going to destroy them, because I had never actually lost it; I had only hidden it, and a hidden thing can be recovered.

When Julian took my phone, he thought he was taking my power, because the meek woman he had married would have had no power without it.