But the assault charge was not part of my design.

I had not known, driving to that party, that Lucan would put his hands on me; I had expected cruelty, contempt, perhaps a scene, but not that.

He did that himself, freely, in front of two hundred witnesses and the hotel’s cameras, because he could not imagine a world in which the rules applied to him.

And there was a bitter symmetry in it that I have thought about many times since.

For three years he had treated the private space of our marriage as a place where the ordinary rules of decent behavior were suspended, where he could be contemptuous and cold and unfaithful because it was private, because it was just between us, because who would know.

And when he struck me at that party, he reached for the same defense out of pure reflex — it’s private, it’s marital, it’s between us — and discovered, in front of everyone, that it had never actually been true.