The words were right there.

But I had decided, somewhere on the drive back to the hills, that I would take his company and his house and his name off my own by every lawful instrument I owned, and that I would not, on top of all that, hand him the satisfaction of having been right about me.

He had wanted to marry a gold-digger so that his cruelty would be justified.

He had wanted, underneath everything, for me to be small and grasping and cheap, because then the three thousand dollars made sense.

I would not give him that.

I would ruin him precisely, legally, completely — and I would do it as the woman I actually was, who had loved him once and hoped for him longer than he deserved, and who was ending this not out of spite but out of the plain refusal to be priced by a man who could not read.