I simply stopped protecting him from the truth, and the truth did the rest.

A year on, my daughter and I live in the house I kept, and my studio has never done better; there is something clarifying, it turns out, about no longer spending half your attention explaining away the perfume on a coat.

I did the one thing a home designer would do with a house that had held a marriage like mine: I redesigned it.

Not out of spite — I did not tear out his study and salt the earth.

I simply made the place ours.

I repainted the rooms in colors I had always wanted and he had always vetoed.