You cannot fight your way out of a cage you’ve been convinced you belong in.

Natalie was the one who kept insisting, quietly, stubbornly, month after month, that I did not belong in it — and some essential part of me stayed awake in there because she would not stop reminding it that it was real.

Chapter 6 — The Blue Folder

The file lived in a blue folder, and the blue folder lived nowhere Nathan could reach, and inside it was the beginning of a truth that turned out to be much larger and much worse than my marriage.

Because when I had first started pulling the thread — the odd statements, the returns that were a little too smooth, the transfers that went out and came back wearing different names — I had assumed I was looking at Nathan.