And it fed something in him that I mistook, for a long time, for ordinary male ego rather than the warning sign it was.

Because a man who needs his wife to be smaller than she is will, eventually, need her to be smaller than that, and smaller again, and there is no bottom to that need — it is a hole that widens the more you pour yourself into it.

By the night of that party I had made myself so small in my own marriage that my husband genuinely believed the woman he’d been married to for three years was a decorative fact of his life.

I had helped him believe it.

That is the part I had to forgive myself for, later: not that he’d underestimated me, but that I had spent three years teaching him how.

“The announcement is for executives,” he said.