Julian took my career from me and called it a gift.

He arranged our life so that I would have no money of my own and told me it was so I would never have to worry.

He believed, right up until the morning Audrey Vance sat in our living room, that he had made me perfectly, permanently dependent — and that belief was not incidental to how he treated me.

It was the foundation of it.

A man does not peel his son’s hands off his sleeve in front of his wife, and comfort his mistress in a hospital hallway, and move another woman into the guest rooms, if he thinks his wife has anywhere to go.

Julian did all of it in the serene confidence that I was trapped, that I would absorb it, that I had no choice but to keep making his favorite dinner and keeping the peace, because where would I go, and on whose money?