Three years earlier, when his company collapsed, the bank had refused to refinance us, and Camden had told everyone in our lives — his mother, his club, the men he golfed with — that he had “handled” it.

He was good at that word. Handled. It let him take credit for a rescue without ever explaining who had actually done the rescuing.

The truth was that I had bought the house outright.

I had done it through a small holding company, Ardmore Holdings, that I had established before we ever married, using money my grandmother left specifically and only to me — money she had made me promise, in the careful way of women who have watched other women lose everything, to keep in my own name no matter who I married or how much I loved him.

I used to think that promise was a little cynical, honestly.