It was never really about the money, or even the affair.

It was that he had convinced me, by patient degrees, to mistake the smallest version of myself for the truest one.

He had talked me out of my own competence so by such small degrees that I had come to believe the quiet, careful, diminished woman rationing coffee money was who I was now — that the other one, the one in the charcoal suit, had been a phase, a younger self I had sensibly outgrown.

The suit told me the truth in the mirror that morning.