I built the ladder, and I did not notice, rung by rung, that the higher he climbed the smaller he needed me to be.

By the time he was calling me domestic at his own dinner parties, he had genuinely forgotten there had ever been a ladder at all.

He believed he had levitated there on merit.

Men like Rupert always do.

It is the flaw that makes them dangerous, and, in the end, the flaw that makes them easy.

I have thought a great deal about the particular way Rupert needed me to shrink, because it did not happen all at once, and if it had I would have seen it.

It happened one accommodation at a time.

Early on, when I corrected him on a point of contract law at a dinner and turned out to be right, he was quiet for two days, and I learned not to correct him at dinner.

When a colleague mentioned, admiringly, that I’d once argued a case he’d only read about, Rupert changed the subject and later told me I’d been “showing off,” and I learned to let my past stay in the past.

Piece by piece I filed myself down, and I called it kindness, called it keeping the peace, called it the ordinary give-and-take of a marriage — and every piece I removed, he pocketed as further proof that there had never been much there to begin with.