Even as I felt pathetic and childlike, defending myself in a rundown apartment that my father paid for, through a phone he had bought for me, I knew that something larger was at stake. Had I retreated, I would have validated Papa’s belief that bullying me was an appropriate way to get what he wanted. If I buckled now, I would be inviting into adulthood the very treatment that I had tried so hard to escape as a girl. I would be setting a precedent that I was still his to control.
