Chapter 7 — Twelve Years, and What They Were
I need to stop here and tell you the truth I spent that whole night on the floor being forced to accept, because it is the center of everything.
Damian had never loved me.
I had never been his wife, not really.
I had been his plan.
We met at a business dinner when I was twenty-one — a fresh accounting graduate, shy, flattered, the only child of a widowed mechanic who owned his home free and clear.
Damian was thirteen years older and effortlessly charming and made me feel, across that dinner table, like the most interesting woman in Texas.
I thought it was chemistry.
It was research.
I would learn, much later and in pieces, that before he ever engineered that first meeting he had done a season of quiet homework — canvassing for exactly my profile, local families with paid-off property and a single heir, the way another man might shop for a used car with good bones and low miles.
I wasn’t the woman he fell for.
I was the acquisition with the cleanest title.
For twelve years he ran the long play.
He was patient in a way that still frightens me to think about.