Any single comment — about the towels, about the nursing, about whose house this was — was, on its own, something a reasonable person could absorb, could tell herself not to make a fuss over, could file under difficult mother-in-law rather than danger. And each absorbed comment made the next one a little more normal, reset the baseline a little lower, until behavior that would have horrified me on the first day had become simply the weather of my life by the seven hundredth.

This is the genius of the slow kind of abuse, and it is why it is so much harder to leave than the dramatic kind: there is never a single moment monstrous enough to match the size of the decision to go.

You keep waiting for the thing that will finally justify uprooting everything, and it never quite comes, because the abuse is designed — not always consciously, but effectively — to stay just under that line.

And meanwhile the person you were, the one who would have been horrified on day one, is slowly sanded down into someone who negotiates with unacceptable things every day and calls it coping.