Roderick signed every document I put in front of him without reading a line, because reading was beneath him and because he trusted that his clever wife was making him richer, which she was.

He never once grasped that the architecture keeping his empire standing had my name at the load-bearing point of every beam.

To him I was the wife who handled the tedious legal parts so that he could do the important work of being important.

He had spent four years standing inside a house I built, admiring his own reflection in its windows, never noticing whose hand was on the foundation.

In the delivery room he thought he was evicting me from his life.