The company can’t spend a dollar she hasn’t signed for.”

The phone slid out of Camden’s hand and clattered onto the bare floorboards.

And the whole edifice of his certainty came down on him at once, because he had spent four years believing he had married a decorative, compliant wife who held no leverage of any kind — and had let himself forget entirely that before I ever took his name, I was the head corporate strategist who spent six years building his family’s fortune, brick by legal brick, from the ground up.

There was a cruelty in his timing that I have come to think was not accidental, and understanding it is the key to understanding the man.