They were never the same thing.”

That confusion is the thing I most want other women to understand, because it is the trap I walked into with my eyes open, and it is invisible from the inside.

I did not stay because I needed Gavin’s eighteen hundred dollars; I had, the whole time, sixty-one million I didn’t know to count.

I stayed because I had come to need him — his approval, his reassurance, his version of me, the small daily verdict he passed on whether I was doing well or badly — and because he had taught me, with great patience, to experience that emotional need as a financial one.

He blurred the two together on purpose, I think, or at least by an instinct that served him: as long as I believed I couldn’t survive without his money, I would never test whether I could survive without his love, and so I would never leave, and so he could keep both the wife at home and the woman in the apartment.