He hurled a string of insults down the line, the kind of language he had never used with me in fifteen years because he had never before been frightened of me, and then he slammed the phone down.

I set my own phone gently on the bedside tray, and I looked out the window at the Chicago skyline, some of which, I reflected, my father had built, and I felt the cold clear thing in my chest settle a little deeper, and grow a little calmer, and become something I could live inside.

I looked at that skyline for a long time.

Somewhere out in it stood buildings my father had raised out of empty lots, over forty patient years, and it struck me, lying there, that I had spent my marriage acting as though none of it had anything to do with me — as if the daughter of the man who built those towers were a woman with no standing of her own, dependent on a middling executive’s salary and grateful for the shelter of his name.

I had inherited an empire and behaved like a guest in my own life.

And the strangest part was how natural it had felt, how right, to hand the sense of my own significance across the dinner table to a man who had built nothing, because he was a man and I had absorbed, somewhere very early, the lesson that a woman’s competence is a thing to be apologized for and hidden, lest it make the men around her uncomfortable.