There never had been.

The Beckworths had simply pocketed each swallowed insult as proof that she would swallow the next one too.

The strangest part, standing at that window, was how little she blamed herself.

A younger Isadora might have spiraled into self-recrimination — how did I let it get this far, how did I not see. But she was thirty-seven now, and she had run a company long enough to know the difference between a mistake and a betrayal.

She had not failed to love her husband.

She had loved him completely, and honestly, and he had taken that love and spent it like counterfeit currency, and the fault for that lay entirely with the man doing the spending.