I’m sure.

I have never been more sure of anything.” And I was not making the decision out of rage, though I had every right to rage.

I was making it out of something clearer and more permanent: the absolute certainty of a mother who has just watched, in a single evening, exactly how the people around her daughter will treat that daughter the moment it is convenient — and who has decided, fully, that her child will not grow up one single day inside their reach.

Because that was the thing the locked door had shown me, beyond anything it revealed about my marriage: it had shown me my daughter’s future, if I stayed.