Every contract, every transaction, every investment was recorded and kept scrupulously separate from anything that could be called marital property, because Isolde had taught me that the difference between an escape and a mess is documentation.

Dashiell believed I was earning modest commissions.

In fact the company was growing across the region, fast.

I bought the limestone house across the street with its own money, quietly, three years in — partly as a safe place I could someday move my mother and my son into, and partly, I think, as a thing I could look at from my kitchen window and remember was there.

An exit I could see.

The only reason I hadn’t used it yet was fear: fear of Emrys growing up without a father, fear of what the neighborhood would say, fear of admitting to myself that I had spent six years mistaking my own endurance for love.