She got it back at sixty.

And every single day of it, now, is her own.

I want to say something about that, because Patricia’s story corrects the single most damaging misconception people hold about women who stay in situations like hers, and I held it too, before I understood.

The misconception is that they stay because they are weak — that a woman who endures thirty-two years of abuse must be, somehow, fundamentally lacking in strength or self-respect, must have chosen, on some level, her own suffering.

It is a cruel belief, and it is precisely backward, and Patricia is the proof.