Don’t worry about a thing. And I had gone, grateful, thinking myself lucky in my husband.

I could see the memory clearly now, and I could see, laid over it like a second image, what it had actually been.

Our house — a spacious, comfortable place in a quiet neighborhood outside the city — did not, as it happened, belong to my husband, whatever he had come to believe.

It belonged to my father, who had let us live in it rent-free since our wedding, but had, in the quiet wisdom of a man who had watched a great many marriages, kept the deed in his own name and the property inside his private trust.

I did not think about that fact often.