And I told him the part that I think finally made him put his pen down and really look at me: that the suburban house Christopher and I lived in was in my name alone, and that four months earlier my late aunt, Estelle, had left me a valuable commercial building downtown.

“Did your husband have access to those property documents?” the detective asked.

Something cold went through me.

“Yes,” I said.

“He had access to everything.”

That was the thing I kept circling back to, lying in that hospital bed.

It was not that Christopher had gotten past my defenses.

It was that I had never built any against him, because you do not build walls inside your own marriage.