By making sure I never quit, he had also taken from me the right to fail on my own terms — to fall down, and get up, and know that both the falling and the getting up were mine.

He had cleared every obstacle so carefully that I had never once found out what I could survive without him.

I asked for space. And for the first time in our entire life together, Matthew didn’t try to stop me, or manage it, or decide where I should go. He simply let me leave.

Chapter 8 — What Do You Think?

The months that followed were painful, and necessary. We started therapy. Matthew had spent years solving my problems before I could even reach them — sometimes he’d start researching an answer before I’d finished describing the trouble.

Now he would catch himself, stop, and ask, “What do you think?” At first I genuinely didn’t know how to answer.

After a lifetime of being rescued, making a choice entirely on my own felt less like freedom than like standing at the edge of something.