And I picked it up in a trembling hand, and I signed — a messy, defeated signature on a document that would give my husband authority over my life.

Nathan smoothed my hair.

“Good girl,” he said.

I have thought about those two words more than almost anything else from that year. Good girl. The reward a man gives a woman for making herself small.

He said it to me the way you’d say it to a dog that had finally stopped struggling, and I sat there with tears on my face and let him believe he had won, because I understood something he did not.

A power of attorney is only as good as the assets it reaches.