Because now that I was looking clearly, the whole shape of it was obvious.
Julian had married me four years ago, fast and romantic, and I’d thought myself lucky.
What he’d actually married was my money.
My father, before he passed, had left me a great deal of it — a trust, and a stake in his firm — all of it structured so that it was mine alone, untouchable by a spouse, under my sole control.
Julian could live beside it.
He could not touch it.
And a man who marries a fortune he cannot reach eventually starts looking for the key.
“You’re out of shape,” he’d told me, again and again.
“You’re exhausted. You’re forgetful. You’re not yourself lately.”
I’d thought he was being thoughtless.
Now I understood he was building something.
A story.
The story of a woman who was becoming unwell — who blacked out, who bruised, who couldn’t be trusted to manage her own affairs.
