There is a lesson in that prenup that goes well beyond the legal facts of it, and I have turned it over many times, because it explains not just how I won but why Ethan lost, and the two are not the same thing.

Ethan lost because of a specific quality of his character that had, for years, looked like strength and turned out to be his fatal weakness: his certainty that he understood a situation without examining it.

He signed the prenup without reading it because he already knew what it was — a document to protect the rich husband from the grasping wife — and being certain that he knew, he did not look.

And that same quality ran through everything.