It moved to helping with the mortgage, which seemed loving to offer.

Each individual step was small enough that refusing it would have felt like an overreaction, like I was the difficult one, the cold one, the one making problems out of nothing — and that feeling, that I would be unreasonable to object, was itself the mechanism, applied a thousand times over a decade.

You do not stay because you are foolish.

You stay because you are decent, and because decent people give the benefit of the doubt, and extend grace, and assume good faith, and will not walk out over small things — and abusers of this kind survive entirely by keeping every individual demand just small enough to make walking out feel like the unreasonable response.