Emily had stopped counting the days they’d been in Tennessee. The hotel suite smelled faintly of cedar polish and Brian’s cologne, but neither brought her comfort. Every morning she woke with the same thought: ‘I chose this hell. And if I chose it, I can choose a way out.’
For the first few months of their marriage, she’d believed escape was impossible—that the walls Brian built around her were impenetrable. But lately, cracks had begun to show. She had learned to keep her eyes open, to notice openings where once she saw only dead ends.
One of those openings had come two days ago, in the form of a discreet email from an old Fulbright contact. Years earlier, before her marriage, she’d been shortlisted for a research residency in the U.S.—a project tied to her early-stage work on Neurogras
