He asked about my day and appeared to listen.

Looking back, I can see it was a performance too, a courtship of a woman he thought was pleasant and unremarkable and slightly beneath him, which is exactly why it felt so safe: a man who thinks he is marrying down is not calculating your worth, or so I reasoned.

I mistook his mild condescension for the absence of greed.

What I could not see, from inside it, was that the condescension was the greed — that he had simply priced me wrong, and would have been far greedier had he known the real number.

When I told him what I told everyone — that I consulted, that I did all right — Brightline Logistics, the subsidiary where he strutted with his director’s title, was one small branch of a tree I had planted long before he learned my name.

My shares were shielded by a prenuptial agreement he had signed, cheerfully, beside his own lawyer, back when he looked into my eyes and swore he wanted my heart and not my accounts.