For seven days of marriage, and months of engagement, and years before it, I had been immersed in a counterfeit of love so thorough that I had lost the ability to recognize the real thing — a counterfeit in which affection came with an invoice, in which my worth was measured by my usefulness, in which the people who claimed to love me tracked my compliance like a balance owed.

And the counterfeit was persuasive precisely because it used all the right words.

Logan said he loved me.

Eleanor called me family.

They spoke the vocabulary of love fluently, and I had mistaken the vocabulary for the thing itself.

It was only holding my mother’s message in my hand — nine words, no demand, no condition, no reminder of what I owed, nothing but a wish for my safety and my joy — that I felt, by contrast, the sheer weightlessness of real love, the way it asks for nothing and wants only that you are well.