The confusion is between generosity and self-erasure.

For four years, I had experienced my payments as generosity, as kindness, as the good and loving thing a person does for family, and because I valued being generous and kind and loving, I could not bring myself to stop, because stopping felt like becoming stingy, and cold, and selfish, all the things I did not want to be.

Daniel had understood this about me perfectly, and had weaponized it; every time I hesitated, he invoked family, and generosity, and love, and I folded, because I would rather have been used than be the kind of person who refused her family.

But there is a line, invisible until you have crossed far past it, where generosity stops being a gift you give and becomes a theft they take, where your kindness stops flowing from your strength and starts draining it, where the thing you call generosity is really just the slow erasure of yourself for people who feel entitled to the erasing.