Dorian had loved her, in his way, and had also, in his way, used her strength as an excuse to give her less — had told himself that she would be fine, that she always was, that she did not need the defending his mother required, because she was the strong one.

And so the strong one had gone five years without ever being stood up for in her own home.

She thought a great deal, afterward, about that particular injustice — the way capability becomes, in the wrong hands, a reason to be given less — because it is so common, and so invisible, and so rarely named as the harm it is.

The strong are not protected in this world; they are drafted.