They had built a machine for breaking dependent women.

They did not know what to do with an independent one.

And so the machine broke instead.

I think about that often, in the context of the women my firm helps now, because the lesson is not that I was special.

It is that the machine only works on the isolated and the dependent — and that the whole strategy of a man like Arthur is to make sure the women in his life stay both.

Patricia was trapped for thirty-two years not because she was weak, but because she had been deliberately, systematically stripped of the money and the outside connections and the independent standing that would have let her leave.