I only get French manicures. Soft pink, white tips, nothing loud. I’ve done it that way for as long as I can remember, and if you asked me why, I’d probably tell you it’s just what I like, that it’s classic, that it goes with everything. And that’s true, as far as it goes.

When I first moved in with him, something changed almost immediately. The relationship I’d agreed to and the relationship I was suddenly living in were not the same thing. He got more controlling the moment we were under one roof, and I started to feel trapped in a way I hadn’t seen coming. I wasn’t feeling good about any of it, honestly, not even at the start. There’s a particular kind of dread that settles in when you realize the door has closed behind you and the person on the inside is not who they were on the outside.

I reached out, around that time, to a guy I knew. Just reached out, a lifeline of sorts, some contact with a world that wasn’t the one closing in around me. And when my ex found out, he came unglued. He tore up pictures of us, ripped them to pieces, and then he took off, just left, and didn’t come back until the next day. I remember sitting there in the aftermath of that, in a home that had stopped feeling like mine, and understanding that I was in something I didn’t know how to get out of.

Hindsight is a clear-eyed and unforgiving thing. Looking back, I can see that I could have gone and gotten my own place. I didn’t feel like I could return to my parents’ house, for reasons that made sense to me then, and somehow I also couldn’t see the option that seems obvious now. Maybe I was stubborn. Maybe I was in too deep to think straight. Maybe I just kept believing it would get better if I stayed and tried harder, which is the belief that keeps so many people exactly where they shouldn’t be. Whatever it was, I stuck with it. And it kept not getting better.

Eventually he threw such a fit at our landlord that we got thrown out of the place entirely, and I was the one who had to go find us an apartment and put it in my name, because of course I was always the one whose name things ended up in, whose steadiness had to cover for his chaos.

Then there were the small things, which weren’t small at all. Once or twice, leaving that new apartment, he’d fly into a rage about what I was wearing, especially if I was going somewhere without him. And if my nails were painted red, he’d call me a slut. Just like that. Red nails meant I was up to something, meant I was his to shame and control. That is where the French manicures come from. Or at least it’s part of where they come from.

All these years later, long after he lost any say over my body or my life, I still reach for the soft pink and the white tips, and I still don’t reach for the red. I’ve told myself it’s just a preference, and by now it partly is, because that’s how these things work. The fear wears a groove so deep it eventually feels like taste. That’s the thing nobody warns you about when you finally get free. You think that once he’s gone, he’s gone, and mostly he is. But he left little settings changed inside me that I never consciously chose, and some are so quiet I can almost mistake them for my own.

A manicure is a strange place to keep a scar. But that’s where one of mine lives, every few weeks, in the color I still avoid. I’m not writing this to be sad about it. I’m writing it because I think it’s worth naming, how far the reach of that kind of control extends, how long after the fact it can still be steering small choices you’d swear were yours.

I got out, eventually. I put the apartments in my name and I built a life he has no say in anymore. And still, when I sit down at the salon, I hear the faintest echo of an old rule. I’d like to say that someday I’ll get the red just to prove something. Maybe I will. But I’ve also made my peace with the pink, because choosing it freely, knowing exactly where the instinct came from and keeping it anyway because I genuinely do think it’s pretty, is its own small kind of winning. The difference is that now I know it’s a choice. Back then, it was an order. That’s the whole distance I’ve traveled, right there on my fingertips.