“It’s my hard-earned salary,” I said, and I kept my voice level, because I had learned long ago that calm is the most enraging thing you can offer a person who wants a fight.

“And I’ve decided who has access to it.”

That was the sentence that did it — the small, quiet assertion that the money I earned was mine to govern.

Her face changed, twisting into something ugly and sudden, and what followed I will describe only in its outline, because she is not entitled to have it told in detail.

There was an altercation.

It was not mutual, whatever her lawyers would later try to claim; it was a thing done by her, to me, and it ended with me injured and breathless against the edge of the kitchen counter.