“Your salary routes into our joint checking account starting tomorrow.” He took a heavy step toward me, towering over my seated body — a silhouette of domestic tyranny.

“My mother has the passwords to monitor the outflow. You’ll finance the groceries out of your own pocket. Six in the morning, you’re up and cooking. When I come back from the site, dinner’s plated and there’s a cold beer in my hand.”

He leaned in, bloodshot eyes going wide.

“And the most important rule. When the man of the house speaks, the woman shuts her mouth. If she talks back, she catches a backhand. My mother said if you don’t absorb the lesson the first time, I’m to keep hitting you until it sinks in permanently.”

I stared up at him.

This was the same man who, twenty-four hours ago, had brushed my hair behind my ear and whispered that I was his greatest treasure. Before the wedding he had marketed himself as a modern gentleman — tailored shirts, dim Italian bistros, literally asking permission before holding my hand.

He’d warned me his mother, Christine, was “a bit traditional,” and begged me to overlook her eccentricities.

It had been a masterclass in bait-and-switch. He played the sensitive modern man to set the hook. Now that the certificate was notarized and the mortgage was signed, the fisherman dropped the disguise.

A sharp laugh escaped my throat.

“What the hell is funny?” Tom snapped, derailed. My total lack of terror made him instinctively give back a half-step. He’d expected a cowering, weeping victim.

“Nothing.”

I stood, stepping over a puddle of gravy. I crouched by the wall and picked up a large curved fragment of porcelain with a painted blue rim. It was a piece of my mother’s vintage wedding china — a keepsake she’d slipped into my suitcase the day I left for college.