What matters first is this.
I had been married for 4 years to a man who loved me the way people love a painting, admiringly from a distance and mostly when other people were watching.
My husband, I’ll call him my husband because that’s what he was legally on paper, in the eyes of everyone at that wedding, worked as a project director at a midsize architecture firm downtown.
He earned good money, not extraordinary, but comfortable enough to feel like a provider.
That was important to him in ways I didn’t fully understand until it was too late.
I was a corporate attorney, partner track, the kind of job that sounds impressive at dinner parties and feels like a second mortgage on your soul every morning.
I billed more hours in a week than most people worked.
My firm handled mergers, acquisitions, high-stakes contracts for companies whose names you’d recognize.
I was good at it.
I was very, very good at it.
When my husband and I met, he had just been promoted.
He was confident, funny in a quiet way.
He opened doors, literally physically opened doors, and I thought that meant something about the kind of man he was.
We dated for 2 years, got engaged, got married, moved into a house I made the down payment on, and we both pretended was ours equally.
His mother, I will call her my mother-in-law, though the word mother does a kindness to the relationship that was never earned, had opinions about me from the beginning.
Not loud ones.
