They did not want to hurt me and be done.

They wanted to break me — the leg first, and then the job, and then the will — until there was nothing left of me but a quiet, frightened woman who did as she was told.

They were building a cage, and the broken leg was only the first bar of it.

I understood, lying there, that I had been misreading my own marriage for a long time, and that the misreading had nearly killed me.

I had thought of the bad days as failures — as love going wrong, as a good man losing his temper, as a family under stress.