“I was alone for eight years, Ferdinand,” I said.

“The only difference now is that I no longer have to pretend I had a partner.”

It was the truest thing I said all night, and I watched it land on him harder than any of the financial revelations had, because it took away the last story he had left.

He could survive, in his own mind, being outmaneuvered by a wealthy wife; that was a defeat, but a defeat has a certain dignity, and he could tell himself he’d been beaten by money and lawyers.

What he could not survive was the plain fact that I had been alone the entire marriage — that the partnership he threatened to withdraw had never existed, that his presence beside me for eight years had been a kind of absence, a man occupying the space where a husband should have been without ever doing a husband’s work of actually seeing me.

He had thought his leaving was a punishment he could hold over me.