I believed, sitting there with my ring in its box and my accounts finally my own, that this was the end of the story.

It was, in fact, only the beginning.

The ring, I should say, I did not throw away, though a part of me wanted to.

I put it in the wooden box and closed the lid and set the box on a high shelf, and I have kept it there ever since, not out of sentiment, but as a kind of evidence of my own, a reminder of a specific mistake I never intend to repeat.

Because that ring represented seven years in which I had confused a transaction for a marriage, in which I had given my whole self, my money, my name, my labor, my silence, to people who were giving me back only the appearance of belonging.