For two years Barrett had treated me as a woman too simple to be trusted with more than an eighteen-hundred-dollar allowance, a decorative dependent, a line item he could economize on.

And the whole of that time he had been racing, in secret, to buy my dead father’s company — the one piece of the world that was purely, legally, unassailably mine — never dreaming that the housewife he’d put on a soup budget held the single vote that could hand it to him or take it away forever.

He had married me and assumed that meant he had inherited my family’s legacy along with me, the way you inherit a set of dishes.

He had never read the will.