He Paraded His Mistress and Swore He’d Never Divorce Me. So I Stopped Competing and Started Calculating

I could have taken those photographs to the press myself.

It would have felt satisfying, for about a day.

But a woman who leaks photographs of her husband’s affair becomes, in the public story, the bitter wife — the wronged party, yes, but also the vindictive one, the one who could not let it go, the one whose pain curdled into spite.

I did not want that role.

I have watched women take it and be diminished by it for years afterward.

So instead I asked myself a simpler question: what does Bianca herself want, more than anything in the world?