I simply stopped being one more person in his life willing to look away from what he had done.

Chapter 14 — Know Your Place

Know your place, you useless outsider. Those were the words Luca hissed at me on our wedding night, in the instant before he raised his hand, and I have thought about them a great deal since, because they contain the entire worldview of the men in that family, and its entire fatal error.

Because Luca genuinely believed that place was a thing a man granted a woman.

That my position in the world was something conferred by a marriage, defined by a family name, bounded by his permission and his father’s approval — a small allotted space I was expected to occupy quietly and gratefully, and from which I could be evicted the moment I displeased them.