My mother-in-law, Rowena, called me a gold-digger to my face and a burden behind my back.
Declan controlled every dollar; I asked him for grocery money each week like a child requesting an allowance, and he enjoyed making me itemize it.
And Seraphina — the mistress he had long since stopped bothering to hide — came and went through the front door as though the deed were already in her name, trying on my house the way another woman tries on a coat.
I absorbed all of it.
I told myself that a good mother endures.
I told myself that if I kept the peace, Poppy would grow up in a home instead of a war.
I had confused silence with love so completely that I could no longer tell them apart — and the people in that house, who understood control the way other people understand breathing, took every inch I gave them and demanded the next.
I want to be honest about something, because I think other women need to hear it: I was not weak.
That is the lie they tell you, and worse, the lie you start telling yourself.
I was not weak.