“No,” I said.

“You used your position to steal from eight hundred employees.

There’s a difference, and the difference is the entire reason I’m standing up here and you’re standing down there.”

It was a genuinely revealing accusation, that one — you used our marriage to steal my future — because it showed, in a single sentence, how Lucan understood the world.

In his framing, the marriage was a resource, like the company, like the employees, like everything else in his life: a thing that existed to advance him, and my “betrayal” was that I had failed to keep serving that function.

He could not conceive of my actions as a response to his — as the natural consequence of a man who cheats and steals and strikes his wife.