And I still, somehow, felt beneath them, because they told me I was, daily, and the telling wore a groove.

That is how contempt works on a person over time: it does not need you to believe it consciously.

It only needs to be constant, and to come from people whose approval you have decided, for whatever wound of your own, to want.

I wanted the Calloways’ approval because some part of me was still ashamed of where I came from, and they knew respectability was the currency I was starved for, and they spent years paying me in its withholding.

The night Preston raised his hand was the night that whole arrangement finally shattered, and what shattered was not really my marriage, which had been dead for a long time.