Our daughter, Nadia, had been three years old when it started — the same year he had persuaded me to walk away from my career.

Chapter 5 — Eighteen Hundred a Month

“I don’t want some stranger raising our daughter,” he had said to me, back then, so warmly, and so reasonably.

“Stay home with her.

Let me take care of both of you.”

I had been good at my work.

I had been a consultant at one of the best financial firms in the city, and I had been rising, and I gave it up because the man I loved made staying home sound like the most generous gift I could give our child.

And after I gave it up, he began handing me eighteen hundred dollars a month — for Nadia’s food, her school, her clothes, her transportation, and every other thing the two of us needed to live.