It has a name, it turns out, the thing Garrett did to me. Economic abuse. The hidden accounts, the f*rged signatures, the slow stripping of a person’s financial independence so they can’t leave. I’d spent a career prosecuting it on a grand corporate scale and never once recognized it happening in my own home, in miniature, in a marriage. Now I recognize it everywhere. And I teach other women how to recognize it, how to document it, how to walk into a lawyer’s office with a drawer full of evidence instead of just a broken heart.
I am very, very good at it. I always was. I’d just forgotten.
I sold the big house, the one with his name on the mailbox. I never liked it anyway; it was built for his dinners, not my life. I live somewhere smaller now, somewhere that’s mine, where the only name on anything is Winters. I took my own name back the day the divorce was final, and I say it the way I used to say it in a courtroom, like a fact that doesn’t require anyone’s permission.
