That woman had died on the floor of an executive restroom.

The woman holding the pen had no questions left.

I did not mourn her, the woman who would have hesitated, though I had been her for fifteen years.

I understood her, and I was even a little tender toward her, the way you are toward a younger self who did not yet know better.

She had believed the things women like us are taught to believe: that a marriage is something you keep by absorbing, that a good wife makes herself small so her husband can be large, that patience is the same as love and endurance the same as loyalty.

She had absorbed and shrunk and endured for fifteen years, and she had told herself it was devotion, and Conrad had let her believe it because her believing it cost him nothing and gained him everything.