It cost me my dignity, every single time, and it cost me the discovery, two years in, that the man I married valued his family’s appetite more than his wife’s self-respect, and would go on valuing it that way indefinitely as long as I kept smiling and kept paying and kept making it easy for him not to choose.

You never once chose me at that table, Derek.

Not one time in two years.

Tonight I chose myself, and you’ve come home furious, and I think you should sit with the question of why my choosing myself feels to you exactly like being robbed.

Because that was the real question under all the other questions, and I had finally stopped being willing to let it go unasked: why the simple act of my keeping what was mine registered, in that family, as a theft committed against them.

Chapter 14 — They Assumed My Labor Was Theirs