“You owe my family six years of social standing, Evelyn!” he snapped, his polished composure gone entirely now.

“My mother made you relevant in this city!

You reinstate that card tonight, or I swear—”

I hung up on him mid-sentence.

I did not block his number.

I simply muted his notifications, and set the phone down on the island, and stood for a moment in the quiet of my own kitchen, considering that last outburst. You owe my family six years of social standing.

My mother made you relevant. It was, I thought, a perfect distillation of how the Vances had always seen me: not as a person, not as a wife, but as an account, a resource, a source of funds and reputation that they were entitled to draw upon, and whose sudden refusal to keep paying was a kind of theft from them.