I knew that look on my mother’s face.

I had seen it before, on other people, in other countries, in situations that had nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with power.

It is the specific stillness of a person who has learned that their own words are dangerous to them, that speaking freely has consequences, and who has therefore begun to run every sentence past an internal censor before letting it out.

It is one of the surest signs there is that someone is living under the control of someone else, and it is one of the hardest to fake and one of the hardest to explain to anyone who has not seen it.