Because the woman who endured thirty-two years of terror and emerged, at sixty, to build a foundation and run a trust and reclaim an entire life in eighteen months was not weak.

A weak woman does not survive thirty-two years of that.

It takes enormous strength simply to endure it, to keep breathing and functioning and protecting whatever she can inside a house designed to break her.

The strength was never the thing Patricia lacked.

What she lacked was not strength but leverage — money of her own, connections of her own, an independent standing in the world that would let her walk out the door and survive on the other side of it.

Arthur understood this perfectly, which is why he spent thirty-two years making sure she had none of those things; why he isolated her, and controlled the money, and forged away the very inheritance that might have funded an escape.