I gave it up when I married Garrett.
Not because he asked, exactly. More the way these things happen — a slow drift. His career was taking off, or so it seemed. He wanted a wife who could host, who could charm investors, who could make his life run smoothly in the background. And I was tired, burned out from years of ugliness, and I told myself I’d earned a softer life. So I stepped out of the arena I was born for, and I became Mrs. Payne, and I let the sharpest thing about me go quiet.
That’s the part I’m least proud of. Not that I left the law. That I let myself be made small, year by year, until a man who would have trembled across an interview table from me came to believe I was decorative.
Because here’s what I slowly understood, far too late: Garrett’s whole “success,” the thing he was so proud of, the empire he preened about at dinners — a great deal of it was built on my family’s money, my connections, and the legitimacy I lent him just by standing beside him. I had let him sit in the big chair because I didn’t need the chair. I’d already had a career that mattered. I didn’t understand that he’d mistaken my generosity for his own genius.
