He also believed I spent my days managing a modest inheritance and volunteering at an arts foundation — that I was a pleasant, ornamental fact of his life, useful at dinners, otherwise beside the point.

He had never once asked why my late mother’s investment firm occupied three floors of a building in Boston.

He had never been curious about my work, because curiosity would have required imagining me as a person with a life of her own, and he preferred the version of me that made him feel taller.

I need to explain how a woman who runs a firm that restructures hundred-million-dollar companies ends up being shoved into a champagne table by a man who thinks she volunteers at an arts foundation, because from the outside it makes no sense, and from the inside it made a terrible kind of sense that took me three years to see.

It happened the way these things always happen: gradually, and with my own participation.

When Lucan and I married, I had just taken over Solstice’s restructuring portfolio, and I was proud of it, and early on I tried to talk to him about my work.