I had stayed quiet through a thousand small cruelties out of that guilt.

I had, I understood now, built a self whose primary function was to feel guilty enough to keep giving, and my family had learned to run me on it the way you run a machine on a current.

And here she was, in my own living room, at the ruin of a plot to end my life, still reaching for the button — still certain, even now, that you’re my daughter would do what it had always done.

What she could not have known, because she had never once been curious about my inner life, was that the woman who could be run on that current had died in a hospital bed weeks earlier, in the hour I stopped being afraid.

The button was still there.

She pressed it.