Had I been rich from the start, he’d have been charming and attentive and my mother-in-law would have found my seasoning delicious.

The cruelty was never personal in the way cruelty usually feels personal.

It was a policy.

It was how his family treated anyone they had priced as beneath them, and I had simply been the one who happened to be miscategorized.

That is a strange thing to find liberating, but I did.

It meant none of it had ever been a verdict on me.