And then a laugh escaped me, strange and uncontrollable, rising up from somewhere very deep, because the sheer perfect completeness of his contempt was, in that moment, almost funny.

It was the laugh, I think, of a woman finally released from a burden she had carried so long she had forgotten its weight, the giddy, disbelieving laugh of someone who has just been handed the last piece of permission she needed to do the thing she had already decided to do.

He thought he was giving me an errand.

He was giving me my freedom.