What the postnuptial agreement did was not to replace love with cold calculation.

It was to make the terms of our partnership explicit, visible, and fair, so that love had a just structure to live inside of, instead of being used as the excuse for an unjust one.

My professional skills did not corrupt my marriage.

They rescued it.

Because it turned out that the same clarity I had spent ten years bringing to failing organizations, the ability to look at a system honestly, to see who was contributing and who was extracting, to name a non-performing liability and require it to either perform or depart, was exactly the clarity my marriage had been desperately lacking.

I had been so busy being a wife and a mother, being soft and accommodating and enduring, that I had left my single most valuable skill at the office door, and the marriage had rotted for want of it.