I think often about how close I came to never doing it.

That is the part that frightens me still, a year on, standing under these same blue lights.

If Lucan had never struck my shoulder — if he had stayed merely contemptuous, merely unfaithful, merely cold — I am not certain I would have found the resolve to end it.

I might have gone on for years more, running a nine-figure firm by day and shrinking myself to fit my husband’s ego by night, telling myself that the marriage was fine, that I was being sensitive, that his coldness was stress and his affair was a phase and his dismissiveness was just his way.

The deniable cruelties are the ones that trap you longest, precisely because they are deniable.

It took an undeniable one — a hand, a mark, a burn under my sleeve — to break the spell I had helped him cast over me.