He was not entirely wrong about the training.

For a long time, I had been that wife.

I had learned, over years, to make myself smaller, to swallow the cutting remark, to accept the diminishment, to nod.

I had told myself that this was patience, that it was the price of a marriage, that a good wife endures.

And Julian had watched me nod and nod and nod, and had concluded, reasonably enough from the evidence, that there was no indignity I would not accept, no cruelty that would finally make me refuse.

That was the assumption on which his entire plan rested: that I would stand in the cold for fifty hours because I always did what he said.