It was a strange gift, in a way — that the very skill Devon had spent five years drilling into me was now the thing that would end him.

I knew exactly how to lower my eyes at the right moment.

I knew how to soften my voice into agreement, how to fold my hands, how to make my whole body say you’re right, of course you’re right. He had built the perfect instrument of his own destruction and called it a wife.

What frightened me was not whether I could do it.

It was how easily I could — how little the mask had ever come off, so that putting it back on took no effort at all.

For five years the obedient woman had not been a role I stepped into; she had been the shape my whole self was pressed into, waking and sleeping, until I’d half forgotten there was anyone underneath.