They had been giving me the one thing that makes a person free inside any relationship: the material ability to leave.

A woman with forty-five thousand dollars sewn into her suitcase can never be trapped by a man who controls the money, because she has her own.

She can never be made to endure the unendurable for fear of where she’ll go, because she can go anywhere.

The check was not a bet against my marriage.

It was insurance against exactly the kind of man I had, without knowing it, married — and the fact that I got to use it fourteen hours in, rather than never, was not a tragedy.

It was the safety net doing precisely what a safety net is for.