So I stayed still.
Richard enjoyed that. He confused quietness with surrender. He always had.
For six years, I had been the wife he demanded: soft-spoken at charity galas, polished at his side during stockholder dinners, smiling while he corrected my pronunciation of French wines I had known long before he ever set foot on the campus of his Ivy League alma mater.
His family called me “graceful.”
His friends called me “lucky.”
Richard called me “manageable.”
He had not used those words the night I found the hotel receipts. He had called me hysterical. Then unstable.
Then, after I hired Miriam, greedy.
Now he wanted the judge to believe I had married him for his fortune, trapped him with a pregnancy, and fallen apart when he “moved on.” His attorneys had shaped me into someone fragile, emotional, dependent.
The mistress, Sloane, wore winter-white silk and my sapphire earrings. That was the first thing I noticed. My grandmother’s earrings.
