Somewhere in seven years of marriage I had made myself smaller for his comfort, the way we are taught to — deferred to him in front of others, softened my competence so it would not prick his pride, let him tell the story of us in which he was the capable one and I was the sheltered girl he took care of.

I had a law degree and a firm and a mind like a trap, and I had spent years dimming all of it down to a glow that would not threaten him, because that is what a good wife was supposed to do, and I had done it so thoroughly that in the end he genuinely believed the dimmed version was the whole of me.

That was his real error, and it was one I had helped him make.

He drew up a plan to murder a sheltered heiress who would never see it coming — and he had never once met the compliance attorney who had been living inside her the entire time, quiet, folded up, waiting, it turned out, for exactly the kind of emergency that would finally make her stand all the way up.