She had built it in the first year of the marriage, before she understood she would need it as a refuge rather than merely a convenience.

From this room she had run one of the country’s most respected investment firms while, one floor above, her mother-in-law criticized the way she folded napkins.

It was an absurd double life when she laid it out plainly, and there had been days it felt almost unbearable — mornings when she closed a nine-figure deal by conference call at dawn and then climbed the stairs to be told she was useless.

She had held the two halves of herself apart through sheer will, telling herself the split was temporary, that one day she would tell Lucius the truth and they would laugh about how long she had kept it.

She saw now that the split had never been temporary at all.

It had been the whole architecture of her life.