I set my wedding ring down on the face of his watch, where he would find it, and I thought that was fitting — the two things a man checks to know what time it is, and whether he is still married.

Then I got dressed, and I signed the papers, and I walked out of that hospital into a cold bright morning as a woman who had, for the first time in longer than I could remember, absolutely no one to take care of but herself.

Chapter 3 — Twenty-Two Years of Disappearing

I want to be careful, telling this, not to turn Gregor into a monster, because the truth is both worse and more ordinary than a monster.

He did not beat me.

He did not scream at me.