But a person who understands she is making a choice can choose differently, at any time, without guilt, because a choice freely made can be freely unmade.

Daniel’s family had spent four years carefully converting my choices into obligations in my own mind, using the language of family and duty and what a good wife does, until I no longer experienced my own generosity as generosity at all but as a debt I owed them simply for existing in their orbit.

That sleight of hand was the machinery of my exploitation, more powerful than any of the actual demands, because it operated on my sense of who I was.

Reclaiming the word chose was, in a sense, the whole liberation.