Back then I heard it as cynicism — as if she were telling me not to trust the man I was about to marry, which felt like an insult to a love I was certain would never need such insurance.

But she had not been talking about Brandon at all.

She had been talking about power, and about what she had watched happen to women of her own generation who had none of their own.

Keep enough money to open your own door was never a prediction that my husband would betray me.

It was a refusal, handed down from a woman who had learned it the hard way, to ever again let another person hold the only key.

The money was almost beside the point; a few thousand dollars is not freedom.