Not entirely — I am sure Ferdinand took what pleasure he could along the way — but at its foundation it was an operation.

He had chosen a woman, cultivated her, paraded her in front of me, specifically to make me react.

Every time he’d let Ravenna’s hand rest on his chest where I could see it, every time he’d kissed her cheek in the driveway, every two-in-the-morning text he’d left visible — those had not been carelessness or even cruelty.

They had been bait. He had been trying, for months, to goad me into exactly the kind of scene a court would call unstable, so that when he moved to have me declared incompetent, there would be a record of the jealous, volatile wife he needed me to be.

My restraint — the silence I had practiced for eight years, the stillness that so irritated him — had not just been my dignity.

It had been, without my knowing it, my defense.