That hope was the entire mechanism of my captivity.

It was the thing that made me answer the phone, and show up to the dinners, and hand over the savings, and swallow the insults, one more time, always one more time, because maybe this would be the time it worked, maybe this would be the achievement that made them proud, maybe the next Thanksgiving would be different.

As long as I hoped, I could be controlled, because a person who is hoping for something can always be strung along by the possibility of it.

And my family were experts at dangling that possibility — a rare word of approval, a brief moment of warmth, just often enough to keep the hope alive and me in orbit.\n\nWhat happened in that auditorium, watching them refuse to look at me, was not that I stopped loving them, exactly.

It was that I stopped hoping.

The hope ended, all at once, having run at last into a wall too high to see over — and in the instant it ended, the trap fell open, because the trap had never been anything but the hope.