He had come to me in tears, and appealed to the most loving part of me — the part that wanted to save my husband, that would sacrifice anything to help the man I’d married — and he had aimed that love, deliberately, at the target he needed hit.

He made my devotion do his dirty work.

The same with the child we never had: for eighteen months he told me we couldn’t afford to start trying, and let me grieve that, let me tell myself we were being responsible and patient, while the money that could have built that child’s future flowed quietly to his sister’s boyfriend’s gambling debts.

He didn’t just deceive me.

He conscripted my best qualities — my trust, my patience, my willingness to sacrifice — and turned them into tools against my own life.

There is a specific violation in that which the word betrayal is almost too small to hold.