You take a virtue the person aspires to — kindness, loyalty, generosity, keeping the peace — and you quietly redefine it to mean compliance with my wishes, so that any resistance to you becomes, by definition, a failure to be the good thing they want to be.

Gwendolyn had done it masterfully, for years, without perhaps even knowing she was doing it. A good wife does not separate a man from his mother. It sounds like wisdom.

It is a weapon, aimed at the self-image Marisol most wanted to protect, built to make her own self-defense feel like a betrayal of her deepest values.

And it had worked, for five years, because Marisol did want to be a good wife, sincerely, and so every time she felt the impulse to object, some internalized voice would ask whether a good wife would object, and she would fall silent, having talked herself out of her own boundaries in the name of her own goodness.

The escape, when it finally came, was not to stop being good.