I had wondered about it in the early days and told myself it was shyness.

Standing in that room I understood it was something a great deal sadder: he had grown up in a place where being loved and being owned had been made into the same thing, deliberately, by the one person who was supposed to teach him the difference, and he had reached adulthood unable to tell them apart.

I was going to have to teach him.

If we lived, if we got out of this house, I was going to spend years teaching my own husband that love was not surveillance, that being cherished did not mean being kept.

That was the marriage I could see, suddenly, through all those photographs — not the one I’d thought I was getting, but a truer and harder and, I decided right then, a more worth-having one.

Chapter 8 — The Diary