He had gone in through Roderick instead, through the one part of the structure I could not engineer against: my husband’s own character.

It is a strange thing to discover that the man who betrayed you was himself being played, that his cruelty to you was, from a certain angle, someone else’s weapon aimed through him.

It did not make me pity him.

But it did clarify something I have carried since.

The trust I built was impregnable.

The man I married was the unlocked door.

In the end, every fortress has exactly one weakness, and it is almost never in the walls.