And the divorce proved, in the flat neutral language of a court, that the story had been exactly backward the entire time.

I had not been living on Luke’s money.

Luke had, in large part, been living on mine.

The house they said he gave me, I had been paying for.

The lifestyle they said I could never have afforded, I had been quietly affording, for years, while being told to be grateful for it.

The truth had been sitting in my accounts the whole time, and it took a catastrophe to make me finally lay it on a table — but when I did, the entire edifice of my supposed dependence dissolved, because it had never been anything but a story the powerful tell about the people who actually hold them up.