And that, I have come to believe, is the quietest and most dangerous damage that a diminishing relationship does.

It is not the big cruelties, the ones you could point to and name.

It is the slow resetting of your own sense of what you are owed, downward, notch by notch, until you have forgotten where the floor is supposed to be, and you find yourself pathetically grateful for treatment that should have been the unremarkable minimum.

I did not know, during those two years, that I was being slowly convinced to expect less.

That is how it works; you never know while it is happening.