What will our friends think?”

There it was — the real currency of that house.

Not love, not even control for its own sake, but reputation. What people would say.

I had been married into a family that measured everything by the opinion of an audience, and they had assumed, correctly, that most brides would endure almost anything to avoid the stigma of a marriage that failed in a single day.

They had built their whole strategy on my shame.

They had simply never checked whether I had any.