I have been asked whether I cried when I saw it, and I did not, and I have never been able to explain why not.

What I actually felt, in a conference room in Hartford in January, looking at two pieces of paper that matched to a hundredth of a dollar, was something much smaller and much worse.

I felt embarrassed.

Because for seventeen years, at dinners, at company events, in the back of cars, I had listened to my husband describe how he had built that company out of nothing, and I had sat there and felt a private, warm, entirely unspoken sense of partnership about it — we both know — and I had never once said anything, because saying it would have been unseemly.

And he had not been keeping a shared secret with me.