It is not joy.

It is something more primal than joy — the body’s recognition that survival is, after all, possible, that there is a way out, that the trap she had come to accept as the permanent shape of her life has a door in it, and that a friend on the other end of a phone line has just handed her the key.

I smiled because, for the first time in five years, I was no longer alone with it.

And there is nothing an abuser fears more, or works harder to prevent, than the moment his victim stops being alone — because isolation is the whole foundation of his power, and the instant one other person is standing beside her, in her corner, unafraid of him, the balance of the entire situation has already, quietly, and permanently, shifted.

Chapter 4 — I Hit Record

They had all thought, for five years, that I was a helpless sheep.