He had no idea.

He was still thinking like a man whose only problem was an embarrassing accident — a scene to be managed, a story to be spun, a wife to be talked down.

He did not yet understand that his real problem was not the thirty witnesses, or even the necklace, or the two years.

His real problem was that he had spent those two years believing the most dangerous lie a man can believe about the woman he’s wronged: that because I stayed home, because I stretched his eighteen hundred dollars, because I had gone quiet and small and grateful inside the little life he’d built to contain me, I was powerless.

He thought he was looking at a dependent wife who had nowhere to go and no way to get there.