This was the deepest thing I learned from the whole affair, and it changed how I understand both kinds of abuse — the kind that leaves bruises and the kind that leaves forged signatures — because I had always, before, thought of them as separate categories, one a matter for the police and one a matter for auditors like me.

They are not separate.

They are the same disease, expressed in two organs.

What Arthur did to Patricia’s body and what he did to Patricia’s inheritance both flowed from a single underlying belief, the belief that sits at the root of every form of abuse there is: the belief that another person is not fully a person, but a possession — something that belongs to you, that exists for your use, that has no independent claim on its own body, its own money, its own life.

Once a man believes that about a woman, the specific forms the abuse takes are almost interchangeable.