I had been treated as property for six years.

It took me a long time to recognize, in that quiet house, that I was being treated as a person — and longer still to notice that somewhere in the middle of it, I had started watching the door in the evenings, waiting for the sound of his car.

I want to be honest that it frightened me, that watching. I had married David for love and buried him and been handed to his mother like a piece of the estate, and I had learned, in the years since, that letting yourself want something was how you gave someone the leverage to take it.

So I fought it. I told myself that what I felt for Bruce was only gratitude, that a rescued woman naturally attaches to her rescuer, that it would be pathetic and predictable to mistake safety for love.

But it wasn’t the rescue that undid me. It was the small things — the way he learned that Erica was shy about her singing and never once asked her to perform, so that she came to it on her own; the way he’d leave a room to take a hard phone call so the girls wouldn’t hear a raised voice; the way he set a cup of tea by my elbow, at night, without a word, because he’d noticed I liked it and never mentioned that he’d noticed.

You cannot be grateful to a man for those.