I saw the sole owner of the thing my husband had just bet his entire life he could steal.

I have thought since about why the band mattered so much to me in those first days, when there were larger and more practical moves to make.

It was not vanity, though it may have looked like it.

It was a correction.

For a decade, the story of my life had been written by other people — by a husband who cast me as the decorative wife, by a board that saw the CEO’s pleasant, forgettable spouse, by a whole social world that had agreed I was soft and slight and safe.

And in the ballroom, Sena and Marius had tried to write the final chapter of that story for me too: the madwoman, escorted out, ruined and pitiable.