You cannot guard against a danger you are constitutionally unable to see, and Arthur’s whole psychology was built, brick by brick over thirty-two years, on the foundational assumption that I did not matter — that I was scenery, a footnote, a thing of no consequence.

That assumption was the source of all his cruelty, yes.

But it was also, in the end, the source of his ruin, because it meant he handled me carelessly, spoke freely in front of me, parked his shares in my name without a second thought, and never once imagined that the footnote was reading itself.

His contempt did not just wound me for three decades.

It blinded him, completely, to the one person in his life who could take him apart — and it blinded him precisely because taking him apart would require me to be significant, and his entire identity depended on my being nothing.