A seamless door clicked open, revealing a private elevator my husband had never known existed — had never thought to wonder about, in eight years of living in a house he believed was his.

I stepped inside and pressed the single button and descended one floor.

And when the doors opened again, the meek, humiliated woman from the kitchen simply ceased to exist.

I had built that elevator, and the office below it, three years into my marriage, and I had told myself at the time that it was practical — that a woman running a fund the size of Kingswell needed a secure place to work, and that a hidden one under the house was simply prudent given how public my grandmother’s enemies had sometimes been.

All of that was true.

But standing in that descending elevator on the night everything changed, I understood the deeper reason I had built it, the one I’d never admitted.