Corvin was worse, because Corvin was a coward.

He had let his mother be the villain of the morning and sipped his tea while she did it, and when it went wrong he would let her be the villain of the afternoon too — my mother was only being protective — as though he had been a bystander at his own marriage rather than the man who told me to sign and be quiet.

That was the rot at the center of him.

Not the greed, though he was greedy, and not the arrogance, though he had that in abundance.

It was that he would never, at any moment, in any room, be the one to stand up and say the hard thing himself.

He outsourced his cruelty to his mother and his courage to nobody, and he had married me believing I was small enough that this arrangement would never cost him.