And finally as something vaguer and larger, the general harmony of the family, the good of us all.

It happened by degrees so small that I never felt the moment it happened, the way you never feel the moment a room gets dark.

And one day I looked up and the career was gone, and with it, though I did not yet understand this, the single most dangerous thing I possessed, as far as my husband was concerned: a trained eye for exactly the kind of pattern he was about to spend years hiding.

Chapter 7 — Access Without Control

What replaced my independence, over those years, was a life that looked, from the outside, like abundance.

We had a large house.