The plain, unglamorous, world-changing fact of standing — of being a person who could not simply be told what she was worth by people who had decided in advance that it was very little.

For the length of my marriage I had lived without it, and had not even known that the low, constant hum in the background of my life was the sound of having no ground to stand on.

Rutger had seen it before I did.

He had built me a place to stand and left it waiting, wrapped in a folder, for the day I would need it.

And I had needed it exactly, precisely, on the worst morning of my life, which I have come to believe he somehow knew I would.