I had stood in grocery aisles doing arithmetic.

I had felt a small, ridiculous guilt buying myself a coffee when I was out of the house, because my husband had trained me, patiently and by degrees, to believe that we did not have money to spare — that his wife wanting a beautiful thing was a kind of selfishness, an extravagance the family budget could not absorb.

Plain soup, for the mortgage.

And the entire time, he had been spending a hundred and ten thousand dollars of what I would soon learn was not even his own money on a necklace for the woman in his lap.