It does not look like a cage while it is being built.

It looks like compromise.

It looks like love, even, right up until the day you notice you cannot leave.

By the time I noticed anything clearly, the walls of the cage were most of the way up.

My mother, who had raised a daughter alone through hard years, who had buried a husband and kept her feet, had somehow become a woman who checked the room before she spoke.

I did not have a name yet for what I was watching.