And my husband, who had struck me twenty minutes earlier and told me to go home, stopped breathing.

Every step toward that stage carried me farther from the woman Lucan thought he had trained me to be.

It was not a long walk — thirty feet, maybe — but I had been walking toward it, in a sense, for three years, and I took it slowly, and I did not hurry for anyone.

Thurston offered his hand as I came up the steps.

The applause started uncertainly, a scatter, and then it gathered and swelled as two hundred people understood, all at once, that the quiet wife their future president had just shoved into a table was the person who had saved their company.

I had wondered, in the weeks leading up to that night, whether I would feel triumphant on that walk, and the strange thing is that I did not.