“Give me the phone.”

Emotional. It was the word he had used on me for a year, every time I disagreed — at dinners where he laughed off my nonprofit as a hobby, at his mother’s table where I was “sweet but impractical,” among his colleagues who assumed I was a woman marrying up and out of my depth.

Not one of them had ever bothered to ask what I did before the nonprofit.

Not one of them knew that the hobby had a legal staff, and a litigation record, and a specialty.

Standing in that room with a young woman’s hand on my bag, I felt the whole careful disguise of the last year fall away, and I was, again, entirely myself.

“Catalina,” I said, without turning.