Not the hospital, where a man in a white coat had been paid to let me slip away on the table and call it medicine.

The two institutions a person is taught, from childhood, to run toward when they are in danger — the family and the doctor — had both been turned against me before I even knew I was in a fight.

And once you understand that, you stop looking for rescue and you start building your own ground to stand on, because you have learned, in the hardest possible way, that no one is coming who hasn’t already been bought.

I think that is the moment I actually became the woman who would see all of this through to the end.