RECLAIMING MY LIFE FROM THE UNTOUCHABLE CEO
Debt.
I thought of every version of this moment I had imagined over the years, late at night, pressing his shirts with a kind of devotion I mistook for purpose. In none of those imagined conversations had he ever used that word to my face, in front of people who already thought so little of me that hearing it confirmed seemed almost to delight them. I had built an entire identity around being useful to him, around believing that usefulness would eventually calcify into love, the way pressure turns coal into something valuable. Standing there, I understood for the first time that some things never transform no matter how much weight you put on