Chapter 2 — Cold Logic

For five years, I had paid the three-thousand-five-hundred-dollar monthly mortgage on the luxury condominium Julian liked to call his house.

For five years, I had funded, out of my own earnings and my own inheritance, the lavish and effortless lifestyles of my husband and his mother, Fiona — the designer clothes, the country club dues, the cruises, the endless small luxuries neither of them ever thought to thank me for, because they had long since stopped seeing my money as anything but the natural weather of their lives.

And in exchange for all of it, I was treated as an unpaid servant in a home I was purchasing, and now I was locked in a cold, dark kitchen overnight, as punishment for being physically unable to prepare a sixty-course banquet before noon.

I sat down on the freezing tile floor.

And I waited for the tears to come, the way they always had, the way a beaten woman’s tears come.