That is the natural response, and it is not wrong, exactly, but it is, I have come to believe, usually a trap, and Marcus was counting on me falling into it.

Because a fight was a battlefield he understood.

He had more money than I did, at that moment, having taken it all.

He had more appetite for cruelty.

And a drawn-out, vicious divorce would have kept me locked in combat with him for years, spending my energy and my money and my one precious life in a war against a man I should have been walking away from, letting him remain, in his hatred, the central figure of my existence exactly as he had been in my love.

He wanted me to fight, because fighting would have kept me his.