It let her hear the ease of him.

There was no hesitation in that recorded voice, no flicker of guilt, no trace of a man wrestling with his conscience. She trusts me. He said it the way you’d note that a door was unlocked — not as a betrayal of trust but as a property of it, a feature to be exploited.

And Isadora understood, listening, that for the entire length of their marriage her husband had experienced her love not as a gift he was lucky to receive but as a vulnerability he was clever to have found.

Every time she had trusted him, he had filed it away as leverage.

Every time she had chosen not to check his work, he had counted it as permission.

The generosity she had been so proud of, the choosing-to-believe-the-best that she had thought was the finest thing about her, had been, to him, simply the largest and most convenient of the many things she’d handed him without asking questions.