Every crisis, I had solved.

And in doing so, I had taught her, and taught myself, that her demands were laws and my resources were hers by right.

That morning, with four words, I taught her something different: that the flow of money she had come to experience as permanent, as a fact of nature like the sunrise, had a source, and the source was a person, and the person had, at last, decided to close the tap.

Her scream and then her silence were the sound of a woman discovering, for the first time, that the thing she had treated as free had never been free at all, and that the person she had spent years despising had been, all along, the only thing keeping her comfortable life from collapsing.