Julian believed, completely and to his core, that I depended on him for everything.

It was the foundation of everything — his certainty that I could not leave, because I had no money of my own, because he had made sure of it, because he had so generously insisted I never needed to work.

He was wrong, and he had been wrong for six years, and he never once suspected it.

When my grandmother died, early in our marriage, she had left me two small commercial properties in Ohio — nothing glamorous, a modest storefront and a little office unit in a town Julian had never bothered to visit.

He had waved them off as clutter, an inheritance beneath his notice, and told me to have someone sell them and be done with it.

So I did sell them.