He had married the person who was about to own the company he worked for.

He would not understand, even later, even with all of it laid out, how the two things could both be true — that I had stood beside him at a hundred dinners as the agreeable wife and had, the whole time, been the person his own chairman called when the company was drowning.

To him they were different women, and he had married the harmless one.

He had never grasped that they had always been the same woman, and that the harmlessness had been a courtesy he mistook for a fact.