It was the one asset within his reach large enough to fill the hole he had dug, and I was the only thing standing between him and it, and so I had become, in his mind, simply a problem to be solved.

When Delia laid it all out on her conference table — the debt agreement, the lender, the numbers — I felt something click into a final, terrible clarity.

Everything Derek had done made a hideous kind of sense now.

He had not burned me in a moment of passion, or over some abstract question of who wore the pants in our marriage.

He had burned me because he was cornered by his own greed and his own failures, and my father’s house was the door out, and I was the lock on the door.