It was the quality Ian had married and the quality his mother had exploited, and lying in that bed I felt it simply switch off, the way a light switches off, leaving behind something clear and hard and patient that I had not known was in me.

I have thought since about where it came from, that cold competence, and I believe it had been there the whole time, underneath the trained smallness — the part of me that had, before I ever met Ian, read balance sheets for a living and found the errors other people missed.

They had spent five years convincing me that woman was gone, or had never existed, that I was only soft and only anxious and only lucky to be loved.

And in the space of two text messages they had, without meaning to, woken her all the way up.

I did not feel like Dara Prentice, the accommodating wife.

I felt like myself for the first time in five years, and myself, it turned out, was not someone you wanted to have wronged.