But the truth was uglier than that.

Gavin never loved me for being simple.

He enjoyed believing I was beneath him — and as his success grew, that enjoyment curdled from affection into tolerance, and from tolerance into contempt, and, on one summer night, into a belt.

They all made the same mistake, in the end — Gavin, Mason, Charlotte, Bridget.

They looked at a quiet woman and read the quiet as weakness.

They never understood that some people are quiet not because they are afraid, but because they are watching, and measuring, and calculating the exact steps that will let them walk out standing up.