It was the scar tissue of five years of injury, the emotional equivalent of a limb that has been hurt so many times it has stopped sending pain signals.

A person should not have to go numb to survive her own marriage; the fact that I had is itself an indictment of everything that came before that night.

And yet.

And yet it was the numbness that saved me, because it was only in the absence of feeling that I could finally think.

For five years, my own feelings had been the thing that kept me trapped — the love that made me forgive, the hope that made me stay, the hurt that made me plead, the fear that made me obey.

Every one of those feelings, in that marriage, had been turned into a leash.