I didn’t call it an escape at the time. I called it Camp Creek. I called it the cabin on the side of the mountain. I called it “the place I can afford for now.”

It was one room, and the floor sloped toward the back wall. The windows were small, but offered a panoramic view of the trees. There was hook by the door where I hung a hat and scarf I never wore — the only hook in the whole place. It gave me a sense of “home”.

There was a bench by the door, three faded pillows on it. A wreath above on the bench, lopsided, that I never fixed. I liked that it was crooked. It felt honest. When I went outside for coffee, I sat on the deck . . . not the bench. I left the bench untouched, like the dining table in the place I left. It was never home there. And the Camp Creek cabin was the most at home that I’d ever felt.

It was always windy there. The kind of wind that doesn’t ask permission, that pushes through the trees and makes them lean. I would sit on the porch with my tea going cold to watch them and think: they’re going to break. They never did. They bent. They swayed. They held.

I didn’t feel hopeful then. I didn’t see it as a beginning. I only knew I had left. Left the house, left the person, left the version of myself who kept explaining, kept apologizing, kept tolerating the other women . . . kept trying to make it make sense. There was grief in that leaving — not for him, but for the years I gave, for the woman I was in that house, for the belief that if I just loved better it would be okay. Grieving that is a quiet, lonely thing. No one brings casseroles for that kind of loss. You grieve the time. You grieve the self you abandoned to keep the peace. You grieve the fact that you stayed as long as you did.

Some nights I would wake up in the cabin and not know where I was for a few seconds. Then I’d hear the wind and remember: I’m here. I’m safe. I’m alone, and it’s not a punishment. I would get up and clean, even if I wasn’t dusty, just to have something to do with my hands. I cooked for one. I swept the sloped floor. I learned the sound of the wind when it was happy and the sound it made when it was about to whip.

I stayed. Quietly. No fanfare. Just me in that cabin on the mountainside, while the wind did its work.

I painted it recently — not the pain of it, but the fact of it. The cabin small against the trees. The bench with the pillows. The wreath, still crooked. The wind you can’t see, only feel in the way everything leans. I called it Held by the Wind because that’s what it was. Not saved. Not rescued. Held.

Funny thing: my neighbor’s name was Hope. I didn’t know that until the day I moved in. In those first days and weeks, I also found a different kind of hope.