He would take care of everything, he’d said.

He would take care of me.

And I had believed him, and I had walked away from a career I was good at, at a financial consulting firm, and become entirely dependent on a man who was, that very same year, beginning an affair.

Since then he had given me eighteen hundred dollars a month — for food, for Mia’s school, for clothes, for transport, for everything — and I had stretched every dollar until it screamed, and felt guilty on the rare day I didn’t.

I need to tell you about the day I quit my job, because it is the hinge the whole thing turns on, and because for years I let myself remember it as my choice.