For eight years I had entered rooms as Ferdinand’s wife — a step behind him, or on his arm, sized up by strangers as an accessory to his importance, and I had let myself be sized up that way, had learned to make myself pleasant and quiet and small enough to fit the space a man like Ferdinand leaves beside himself for a wife.

Now I walked into the largest room of my life alone, at the center of it, with two hundred of the most powerful people in the country turning to watch, and I was not a step behind anyone.

I was the reason the lights had dimmed.

I felt, moving down that aisle, the peculiar vertigo of being seen — actually seen, at full size, for the first time since I was twenty-nine — and I understood that this was what I had denied myself all those years in the name of being loved.

I had thought that hiding my size was the price of intimacy.

It had only been the price of Ferdinand.