It had been a very long, very patient act of containment.

And I was, for the first time, out of the box he’d built, with a few hours before he’d notice the lid was open.

There is a thing that happens to a person who has been controlled for a long time, when the control first lifts: the freedom does not feel like freedom.

It feels like falling.

For five years every choice had been made in consultation with Devon’s imagined reaction, so that I no longer experienced my own preferences as preferences but as risks to be assessed.

And now, in the back of a stranger’s car with a fake trail laid behind me, I kept reaching, out of pure habit, for the permission that wasn’t there — kept bracing for the phone call, the raised eyebrow, the gentle correction.