Nadia came running into my office that afternoon with a watercolor she had painted at school, waving it over her head like a flag.

“Look, Mom!

It’s our new house!”

I pulled her up into my lap and kissed her cheek and looked at the painting — a lopsided house, a too-large sun, two stick figures holding hands in a yard of pure green — and something in my chest settled all the way down for the first time in years.

Barrett had spent our whole marriage believing that if he kept me at home and kept me on an allowance, he could keep me small — helpless, dependent, grateful for whatever he chose to hand down.

He had looked at me and seen an expense on a balance sheet, a cost to be minimized, a woman he could disrespect for free because she had nowhere else to go.