At exactly 11:47 on Christmas Eve, my husband accidentally sent me a photograph of himself in a hotel bed with his mistress while I was home alone caring for our two feverish babies.

I reached toward it, Cole seized my wrist hard enough to bruise it.

He later kissed the marks.

“You know how crazy you make me when you invade my privacy.”

Those words haunted me for forty-eight hours.

Now I understood what I’d forgotten.

Before I became Cole’s wife, I was someone else’s daughter.

And granddaughter.

My father, Richard Bennett, had spent most of his career as a federal judge.

He believed so strongly in rules that when I was twelve, he made me repay my brother thirty-seven cents I’d taken