It was the word of a man who was counting on my having forgotten how to read the very language I had once been fluent in.

He was wrong about that.

You do not forget how to see.

That, more than anything, is the mistake I want other women in my old position to learn from, because it was the linchpin of everything Brandon got wrong about me, and I suspect it is the linchpin of what a great many controlling men get wrong about the women they think they own.

He believed that because I had not practiced my profession in years, I had lost it — that a skill unused is a skill gone, that the years at home had emptied me of the analyst I used to be, leaving behind only a tired, pregnant housewife whom he could manage with a kiss on the forehead and a condescending word.

And he was catastrophically wrong, in a way that reveals how little he had ever actually understood about me, or about competence itself.