I boarded the plane quietly, took my seat by the window, and watched the ground pull away as I finally stopped participating in their chaos.
My phone lit up almost immediately with messages from my son and his partner, demanding explanations and blaming me for what had just happened.

They called it escalation, but I called it stopping, because nothing had changed except that I was no longer available to be erased from my own life.
As the plane rose above the city, I realized the hardest part was not leaving the house, but finally accepting I had always been allowed to say no.