It is a magic trick, and it works, and it works best on the person being tricked, because she is too tired to check his math.

For two years I did not check it.

I accepted the terms of an accounting in which the woman keeping everyone alive was the one who owed a debt, and I paid that debt in silence, in swallowed comments and lowered eyes, until the night he raised the price one dollar too high in front of the wrong crowd.

Chapter 2 — Renata

“You’ve really let yourself go,” he would say, not even unkindly, which was somehow worse — the tone of a man observing weather.

“Have you looked at Renata lately?

That’s a woman who takes care of herself.

Always put together.

And then there’s you.”

Renata was his younger brother’s new wife.

To Trent she was a kind of untouchable ideal, floating through family dinners in soft, elegant clothes, unhurried, unbothered, luminous.

To me she was a daily exhibit of everything I no longer had the time or the money or the sleep to be — held up in front of me, again and again, by the man I was destroying myself to support.

And I swallowed it.

Every time.