He Laughed and Asked What Money I Thought I Was Leaving With Since I “Didn’t Even Have a Job” – He Never Knew the Dependent Wife He’d Built a Cage Around Was Sitting on Sixty-One Million Dollars

And I was a new mother, tired and in love and wanting to be good, and I stepped into the picture he’d painted and called it a decision of my own.

I was good at my work.

I had been rising at that consulting firm; I had a mind for it, my father’s mind, careful and quick with numbers and risk.

And I walked away from all of it, at twenty-nine, and handed the whole of my economic life to a man who was, that very same season, unbuttoning another woman’s blouse.

The cruelty of the timing is a thing I still cannot fully hold.