And I have come to think that in the end he did teach me my place, though not remotely in the way he intended.

My place, it turned out, was not beneath him, where he had spent a marriage trying to keep me.

My place was not even beside him.

My place, I understood, standing in the ruins of everything he had built on lies, was somewhere he had never once thought to look for me, and could never now reach: far, far beyond him.

That was the lesson of my thirty-fourth birthday.