You thought the paperwork was beneath you.

I have spent six years learning that the paperwork is the only thing that isn’t.”

I want to explain what I meant by that, because it is the truest thing I said in that corridor, and a thing I wish someone had told me at twenty-five.

For six years I had been treated, by my husband and his mother, as the lesser partner in my own marriage — the one who dabbled in a little online store, who did not have a real career, who was kept and housed by a great man’s generosity.

And the whole time, I was the one who did the books.

I paid the tuition and the fees and the bills.