From the album Preacher’s Daughter
This is a song about someone who needed her father to be a hero so badly that she trained herself to ignore what he actually was, and now she can't tell where his damage ends and hers begins. The speaker isn't trying to leave him. She's trying to leave the version of herself that he built, and discovering that person is all she knows how to be.
Tell me a story / About how it ends / Where you're still the good guy / I'll make pretend
She's asking him to lie to her, but framing it as his job to do the storytelling while she does the labor of believing it. The division of roles is telling. He gets to be passive while she performs the cognitive work of rewriting what happened.
I thought good guys get to be happy / I'm not happy
The logic here collapses in on itself. If good guys are happy, and she's not happy, then either he wasn't good or she isn't a guy in the moral sense he modeled. She's working backward from his supposed goodness to explain her own misery, treating her pain as proof of her failure rather than his.
I was too young / To notice / That some types of love could be bad
The phrase 'some types of love' is doing enormous work to avoid calling this what it was. She's still categorizing abuse as a subcategory of love rather than its opposite, protecting him even now by refusing to reclassify the relationship entirely.
Praying I'd be like you / Doing all of the things that you do / And I still do / And that scares me
This might be the song's actual horror. She wanted to become him, succeeded, and now can't separate which behaviors are hers and which are his infection. The fear isn't that he's still around. It's that he's inside her, operating her from within.
I'm tired of you, still tied to me / Too tired to move, too tired to leave
Exhaustion becomes both the problem and the reason the problem persists. She's tired of being bound to him, but that same depletion makes escape impossible. The parenthetical lines suggest his voice bleeding through, but I'm not sure if those are his words or her ventriloquizing his justifications.
Anhedönia has said she created Ethel Cain as the destroyed version of herself, the person she would have become if she hadn't chosen to break the cycle. This song shows what that looks like from the inside: someone who knows she's repeating the harm but is too far inside the pattern to locate an exit. The parenthetical lines in the outro might be his voice or hers mimicking his excuses. Either way, she can't tell the difference anymore.