And I decided the public part mattered, not for revenge, though I will not pretend there was none in it, but for something harder to name.

Trent had done his damage in public.

That was the design of it.

He had never once belittled me alone, in a room where only I would hear; he had always done it in front of an audience, because the audience was the point — my humiliation was a performance he staged to make himself feel large, and every laughing guest was a small pillar holding up his version of us.

Two years of that had built a story, agreed upon by everyone we knew, in which I was the sad, faded wife and he was the charming man putting up with her.