After the first night I spent at his house, when I was woken up and kicked out at seven in the morning because there was four inches of fresh powder and he couldn’t not go to the slopes, and I shoveled my own car out from the curb and drove my body and my shame home in silence.

After the second or third date, or maybe the seventh or eighth, when I’d notice his eyes scanning the bar, like he was embarrassed to be seen with me, or he thought anyone would be more fun than me or maybe searching for someone to rescue him from me.

After I saw the gifts I’d given him over the years, the special-edition Jerry Garcia tie I thought would bring out his blue-gray eyes, the personalized silver cufflinks a gift for that very important job interview, these gifts in a plastic trash bag marked for Goodwill that I stashed in the trunk of my car and never spoke of again.

After he calls my office line instead of my cell when I’m working late and I don’t answer because I’m in a conference room and he drives to the office to confront me.

After he demands I remove the passcode on my phone from now on because it shouldn’t be that hard, it’s a matter of trust.

After I don’t understand why you’re mad after well I’m sorry you’re upset after why are you acting like the victim after I don’t hit you and I don’t fuck other girls, so please chill the fuck out. After you sound drunk and did you tell them you have a boyfriend, and I don’t want you going out without the girls anymore. After I don’t think it makes sense for you to make more money than me. After if you really loved me, you wouldn’t.

And you.

You didn’t say you deserve better, you didn’t say he’s not good enough for you, you didn’t say leave him, you didn’t even say nande konnayatsuto iruno? since I know you’re more honest in your native language. Instead you said you’re overreacting, you said stop being so uptight, you said why can’t you just laugh it off and be the sweet girlfriend he wants you to be? Instead you said well you are looking a little chubby, you said don’t you think he deserves better from you, you said he just needs you to love him harder, you said he’ll leave you, wouldn’t that be a shame.

To him, you said thank you for putting up with my daughter.

So when you say to me—after I finally found the courage to leave him and move, first 3,000 miles away and then across an entire ocean, after years of therapy and a peeling away of my self-hatred, like picking at a scab and exposing the infestation within and after painstakingly cleaning it out and disinfecting the surface, after I’ve excised him from the wound but not quite you—when you say look at my beautiful baby granddaughter can I hold her, I cannot speak, balanced as I am on that precarious layer of brittle self-respect, where even a single word could dismantle it and send me tumbling back into the unspoken.