He asked me to make myself dependent on him — for my own good, for our daughter’s good — in the same months he was building the second life that dependence would one day trap me inside.

He wasn’t asking me to come home.

He was asking me to disarm.

“What about her apartment?” I heard myself ask, as another piece fell into place.

Gavin froze.

“How much do you pay for her apartment, Gavin?” “…Thirty-two hundred a month,” he muttered.

And my throat closed, because for three years I had felt guilty buying a coffee, while the other woman lived in an apartment that cost nearly twice what he gave his own wife and child to survive on.

He reached for my arm.