Because the deepest damage Luca did to me over eleven years was not financial.

It was that he had slowly, patiently, almost invisibly convinced me to disappear.

Not all at once, never all at once, but degree by degree, concession by concession, until the confident young woman I had been when we married had shrunk into someone who edited transcripts until two in the morning without complaint, who sold her mother’s bracelet in secret, who signed papers she did not read, who had come to believe, genuinely, that she was fortunate to be tolerated by a man who was in fact living entirely off her.

That is what an eleven-year marriage to the wrong person can do: it can talk you out of your own worth so gradually that you never notice it leaving, until one day you look up and cannot remember the last time you took up your full space in a room.