She thought back over the marriage now with the cold, reconstructive clarity she’d once brought to a case file, and she saw a pattern she had been too generous, or too busy, to see while she was living inside it.

The resentment had always been there, running under everything, disguised as jokes.

When she won a landmark acquittal, he congratulated her in a tone that had a hook in it.

When a magazine profiled her and mentioned him only as her husband, he laughed it off and then was cold for three days.

She had told herself these were the ordinary frictions of two ambitious people, that his ego would settle, that love would outlast the small competitions.

She had not let herself understand that to a certain kind of man, a brilliant wife is not a partner but a standing accusation — a daily, living proof of his own smaller size.