It shattered, in a single afternoon, the entire structure of Arthur’s ownership of his wife: took back her money, took back her name, took back her freedom, and took back, above all, the fiction that she had ever belonged to him at all.

You do not free a person from abuse by addressing one symptom.

You free them by destroying the belief underneath all the symptoms — the belief that they were ever anyone’s to own.

Chapter 8 — I Never Signed These

I turned the laptop screen toward Patricia’s hospital bed, and I showed her the loan guarantees — dozens of pages, her signature at the bottom of each.

She stared at them, and her breath caught.