I love our family.” “You love the life my work pays for, and the status your name gives you,” I said.

“You do not love those children enough to protect them from your own relatives.

That’s not a marriage.

That’s an arrangement, and I’m ending it.”

She tried, in that hallway, everything she had.

She told me she’d change, that she saw it now, that she’d cut her mother off, move away, whatever I wanted.