He had never seen her as a partner, or even really as a person.

He had seen her as a lifeline for a sinking business, a source of cash wearing a wedding ring.

That knowledge wounded my mother deeply.

“So all the kind things he ever said to me,” she asked me one afternoon, quietly, “were they all just calculated?

All of it?” It was one of the hardest questions she had to sit with in the whole aftermath, harder in its way than the fear had been, because it reached back and poisoned the good memories too, made her doubt whether any of the happiness of that first year had been real.

I could not answer it for her, and I did not try.