And he had nearly died reaching for it.

Chapter 11 — I Made Myself Smaller

Because that is the part he had never once had the courage to see plainly, and I made him see it now.

For eight years I had deliberately shrunk myself.

I had downplayed my position, left my research publications unmentioned, kept my national awards in a drawer.

I had stood in his parents’ kitchen and let them believe I filed records at a clinic, and let my husband play the successful patriarch who had lifted a modest small-town girl out of obscurity — because he had told me, over and over, that he needed that story to feel like a man.

And the truth underneath the story was this: I had bought the townhouse we lived in years before I ever met him.