And that is the quiet lesson I would hand to any woman who will take it — not that she should scheme, or hoard leverage against the people she loves, but simply that she should never, for anyone, agree to not understand her own life.

Sign nothing you have not read.

Know where your own money lives.

Keep the shape of your own affairs in your own head, even when a charming man is telling you it’s all handled, even when understanding is made to feel like distrust.

It is not distrust.

It is the ordinary dignity of remaining the author of your own circumstances.

I kept that dignity, almost by accident, through four years of being encouraged to set it down — and on the worst night of my life it turned out to be the only thing standing between my daughter and a future somebody else had written for her.