He had catered this.

He had chosen the venue, the timing, the audience, the sequence, the way he chose everything, and he had spent real money to make my humiliation look like his compassion.

And the terrible, clarifying thing — the thing that dried my eyes before I even reached the doors — was that it was, as a piece of work, genuinely good.

He had built an excellent trap.

He had made only one error in the entire design, and it was the same error he had made every day of our marriage: he had assumed that the quiet woman he was destroying did not understand the business as well as he did.

He had never once considered that she understood it better.