That was my expertise.

My husband had spent four days on a boat, and had come home to discover that the drowning woman he had left behind had remembered, in his absence, that she was one of the most formidable negotiators he would ever meet, and that he had, through his own carelessness, become a non-performing liability in the one organization that mattered most.

He reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a pen, and signed his name on the line.

I have been asked, since, whether it felt strange to bring the tools of the boardroom into the home, to treat my own marriage like a contract negotiation, whether there was not something cold about it, something that undermined the intimacy that a family is supposed to be built on.