When his colleagues assumed I was a decorative fiancée, I let them; it was easier than the lecture, and I told myself it did not matter what strangers believed.

When his mother called me sweet and impractical, I smiled and passed the bread.

When Dalton reduced eight years of litigation to a hobby, I let the correction die in my throat, because we were in love, or I believed we were, and love had taught me to make myself convenient.

I did not understand yet that a man who needs you small will always find a reason you should be smaller, and that the shrinking never ends until you stop agreeing to it.

I would come to be almost grateful for that year of being underestimated, because it meant that when the day came, none of them — not Dalton, not Eugenia, not their expensive lawyers — had any idea what was actually standing in the room with them.

They had spent a year looking at the woman I let them see.