She had had six months of that.

What had been taken from her was not primarily the money or even her safety; it was her agency — her sense that her own choices meant anything, that her voice could change an outcome, that she was a person things happened with and not merely to.

And so I did not begin by telling her my plan.

I began by asking her a question and actually waiting for the answer, because it was the first choice anyone had handed her in half a year. Do you trust me. If she had said no, I would have stopped.

I would have found another way that did not require her trust, because forcing my rescue on her would have been, in its own way, one more person overriding what she wanted.

She said I tried to call you, which was not quite yes, and was enough, and was the beginning of the long road back to a woman who got to decide things again.