If our positions had been reversed, if I had been the one married young to Arthur in his prime and slowly isolated and disarmed over thirty-two years, I am not at all certain I would have gotten out in three hours, or three years, or three decades.

No one knows how long they would last inside a machine built specifically to trap them until they have been inside one.

So I hold my three hours lightly, and I hold Patricia’s thirty-two years with nothing but tenderness, because the truth is that we are the same woman, arriving at the same knowledge — that we never needed anyone’s permission to occupy our own lives — by different roads, at different speeds, dictated not by our merit but by our circumstances.

What matters is not how long it took.