I laughed because laughing was the price of staying easy to be around, and being easy to be around was the only version of myself the family had ever rewarded, and I had wanted the reward so badly that I had never once stopped to add up what the laughing was actually costing me.

That is the detail I have had to sit with most since.

I would feel the small cold drop in my stomach and I would laugh along with them, because laughing along was the price of the warmth, and because the alternative was to be the humorless new wife who could not take a joke, and I had decided, somewhere, that being liked was worth more than being respected.

They are not the same thing.