Solitude was not my punishment.

It was my first taste of the freedom I was about to reclaim in full.

Chapter 11 — Compliance Is Not Patience

That night, in a hotel downtown, I did not sleep so much as finally stop bracing, and in the quiet I understood something about the previous three years that I had been unable to see while I was inside them.

I had told myself, that whole time, that I was being patient.

That enduring Marguerite’s contempt and Bristol’s demands and Trevor’s endless family comes first was a virtue — that a good, loving, patient woman absorbs these things for the sake of the marriage, and that my capacity to keep absorbing them was a strength.