I want to say something about doubt, because it is the quiet weapon that keeps so many people trapped in situations like the one I was leaving.

For four days, and really for years before that, the thing that had held me in place was not love and was not even fear, exactly.

It was doubt: the endless, exhausting possibility that I was wrong, that I was imagining it, that a good and reasonable woman would give her husband the benefit of the doubt one more time.

Doubt is what an unfaithful person feeds on, because as long as you doubt, you do not act, and as long as you do not act, they are safe.