It explained the way he’d talk about “the provider” when he wanted a boat and “our shared responsibilities” when he wanted my savings — the words shifting to whatever extracted the most.

A partner is someone you build a life with. A resource is something you build a life from. And Brandon, I understood at last, had married a resource and called it a wife, had stood at an altar and promised to love a revenue stream, and had spent seven years drawing it down as quietly as he could manage while I mistook the withdrawals for a marriage.

The cruelest part was how invisible it had been made to feel from the inside.

He never said you are a resource to me; he said I love you, and he brought me coffee, and he charmed my mother on a train platform, and all of it was true in the small daily way and false in the large structural one, and I could not see the structure because I was standing inside it, holding it up.