For seven years, I had believed that love meant carrying the weight of someone else’s greed.

I had let a mother and a son treat me like a footstool, a resource, a fall guy, because I had confused endurance with strength, and silence with virtue, and had told myself that a good wife bears what she is given.

I had been wrong about all of it.

Endurance is not strength; sometimes it is only a slow way of disappearing.

And silence is not weakness, but it is also not virtue; it is a tool, and I had finally learned to use it as one.