She had been a woman who understood, from her own hard life, exactly what money is for.

And before she passed, she held my hand in both of hers, and she said something to me that I did not fully understand until months later, in a hospital bed.

“Jade,” she said.

“This is so that you never have to ask anyone for permission to save yourself.”

I thought, at the time, that she meant something ordinary about financial security, a comfortable retirement, a cushion.

I know now that she meant something far more specific, and wiser, because my grandmother had lived long enough to have watched women she loved be trapped by their own dependence, unable to leave the people hurting them because they had no money of their own and nowhere to go.