But this — this is the thing that actually broke it.

You didn’t just let your family humiliate me.

You built our whole marriage on a lie and made me pay for it, in money and in the only things I had left of my grandmother.”

I have thought a great deal, since, about the particular shape of what he did, because it was worse than theft and worse than lying, though it was both of those.

It was that he had taken my own goodness and used it as the instrument.

He had not stolen my grandmother’s jewelry from a drawer while I slept; that would almost have been cleaner.