This is the part that people who have never lived inside it find hardest to believe, and the part that abusers rely on absolutely: at no point could my mother have pointed to a single moment and said, there, that was the crime, that was when he trapped me.

There was no such moment.

There was no blow, no lock on a door, no shouted command she could have reported to anyone.

There was only a long, patient sequence of small reasonable-sounding preferences, each one, on its own, the kind of thing a loving husband might plausibly want, and each one shaving a little more freedom off her life.

That is what makes this kind of harm so difficult to see from the inside and so difficult to prove from the outside.