As a woman settling into her proper role.

What he had forgotten, or perhaps never fully registered, was who I had been before I became a mother, before I disappeared into the fog he had mistaken for my nature.

I was not, by temperament or training, a person who absorbed hardship in silence.

I was a senior corporate compliance director.

For ten years, before the twins, I had spent my working life negotiating high-stakes contracts, structuring complex agreements, and, when necessary, identifying and terminating non-performing liabilities, the parts of an organization that consumed resources without delivering value and needed to be either restructured or removed.

That was my profession.