And the exhaustion that rolled over me when it finally let go was the accumulated exhaustion of a year of unbroken vigilance, arriving all at once, and I slept like the dead, like the safe, like a woman who no longer had to listen in her sleep.

That, I have come to understand, is what safety actually is.

Not the absence of a threat you can see, but the moment your body finally believes, all the way down, that it can stop watching for one.

It took eight months and a locked cell to give my body that permission.

I have never in my life been so grateful for a full night’s sleep.

Chapter 18 — Which Lock Still Works