The author became engaged to a man named Sam at 17 years old with her “mother’s full support,” she recalls. When she tried to cut ties, Sam’s first manipulative suicide attempt convinced her that she was “responsible for him, for his life.” By the age of 19, she married him, solidifying Sam’s hold upon her. “Instead of listening to my gut, I forced myself into the church—knowing that I was sacrificing myself. That moment, that choice, lodged in my psyche as trauma.” O’Malley fell into a cycle of coercive control, sexual violence, and abuse. The marriage, at first characterized by unpredictable insecurities and subtle sabotage, devolved into incidents of horrific violence, leading her to leave and seek a temporary protection order. In clear, matter-of-fact prose, the author emphasizes recognizable patterns of intimate partner violence and the need to support women who are attempting similar transformative changes. After her own successful recovery process, O’Malley realized that social services rarely address the gap between the initial rescue from domestic abuse and the therapeutic intervention needed to thrive post-abuse; this reality eventually informed her own nonprofit work with survivors. The author’s relatable narrative voice intersperses key educational moments with recollections of personal experiences, making convincing connections to wider societal problems (she writes that “29% of women will experience physical or sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetime”). O’Malley helpfully explains why so much abuse goes unreported and laments the difficulty of securing personal safety and divorce in a judicial system that rarely addresses psychological trauma. “My entire adult life had been built around Sam—not just financially, but psychologically. I didn’t know who I was without him,” she writes. “Coercive control is an insidious, devastating form of abuse—prevalent, yet largely unaddressed in U.S. law and policy.” This well-sourced work offers important facts, useful bibliographic resources, and penetrating psychological insights.