I had not always been the woman weeping on that floor.

That is the thing that came back to me, lying there — the woman I’d been before Lachlan, before the fifteen years of shrinking.

I had been good at something once.

I’d had a career, a real one, in a field I’d been rising through, before Lachlan had sat me down early in our marriage and explained, so reasonably, that it made no sense for me to keep working when he could provide for us both, that the family would be stronger with me anchoring the home, that this was what partnership looked like.

And I had believed him, because I loved him and because it flattered the part of me that wanted to be taken care of, and I had let my own competence go quiet, year by year, until I’d forgotten it was ever there.

By the time I sat in that courtroom I had come to half-believe the story his lawyer told about me — that I was a dependent, a liability, a woman with nothing to offer.