The hardest part wasn't realizing something was wrong.It was realizing how much I was willing to tolerate once I named it.
Staying became an act I repeated daily, quietly, without witnesses. Not dramatic enough to be bravery. Not honest enough to be denial. Just a series of small choices stacked so close together they looked like fate. I told myself I was protecting something—family, stability, her—but every day I stayed, I paid a little more of myself as collateral.
The devil is fair that way.He always collects.
I started measuring time differently. Not in days or weeks, but in moments I swallowed whole. Moments I felt a flare of anger and extinguished it before it could be seen. Moments I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again because the effort felt heavier than the silence. Moments I convinced myself that peace was the absence of conflict, not the presence of truth.
He didn't ask me to give up everything at once.Just piece by piece.
It showed up in the way he looked through me instead of at me. In how affection became conditional, offered only when I didn't ask questions. In the way apologies disappeared, replaced by explanations that somehow ended with me understanding too much.
You understand, right?You're strong.You know how hard things are.
Strength became the weapon used against me.
At night, I lay awake listening to the house breathe. The walls creaked, the heater kicked on and off, and somewhere beneath it all, I felt the steady erosion of something I used to recognize as myself. I replayed conversations, searching for the moment I could have chosen differently. The moment I might have left before staying hardened into habit.
But habit has gravity.
And children orbit what feels familiar, even when it hurts.
She learned the rhythms before I did—the pauses, the moods, the invisible lines not to cross. She watched his face the way I used to, reading the weather before stepping outside. When she grew quiet, too observant, too careful, something in me twisted. I told myself she was just sensitive. Just perceptive.
I didn't want to admit she was learning survival.
One afternoon, I caught my reflection in the mirror and startled myself. I looked tired in a way sleep couldn't fix. Older than my years. Smaller somehow. Like I had been folded inward to fit a space that never intended to hold me gently.
That's when the thought came, uninvited and terrifying:
What if staying teaches her this is love?
The question lodged itself deep, refusing to dissolve.
I began to notice how much energy it took to maintain the illusion. How every smile felt rehearsed. How "we're fine" became my most practiced line. How I apologized automatically—for tone, for timing, for needs. Even for hurt that wasn't mine to carry.
The devil thrives on misplaced guilt.
One night, after another quiet argument that never quite became a fight, I sat alone in the dark and finally allowed myself to grieve. Not the relationship as it was—but the version of me who believed love would never ask me to disappear.
That version felt far away now. Almost fictional.
Still, I stayed.
Not because I didn't see the damage.Not because I didn't feel the cost.
But because leaving felt like tearing something open I had spent years stitching shut with my bare hands.
The truth is, I wasn't afraid of him.
I was afraid of what remained of me without him.
And that fear—that hesitation, that pause—was exactly how the devil kept his seat at the table.