It was the smartest thing he ever did to leave me, yes, but not for the reasons he believed.

It was smart, from my perspective, though he could never see it that way, because it accomplished, by accident, a rescue he would never have consented to perform on purpose: it removed him from my life.

And his removal was the single necessary precondition for everything good that followed.

As long as I was married to Marcus, I was smaller than myself.

I was shrinking, daily, to fit inside the cramped dimensions of what he could tolerate in a wife, dimming my own competence so it would not threaten him, apologizing for a career he mocked, deferring to a judgment worse than my own.