I want to pause on the sixty dollars, because it was the first genuine boundary I had set in three years, and it felt, absurdly, like the most dangerous thing I had ever done.

Not thirty thousand.

Not two thousand.

Sixty.

A number small enough to be an insult and specific enough to be a statement.

For three years I had said yes — to the credit cards, the demands, the servitude, the slow annexation of my own home — because saying yes was easier than the war that saying no would start.