She had thought she was so terribly brave and bold, leaving Alain. He hadn’t seen it coming, had simply come home one day to their large Parisian apartment to find her gone. She hadn’t planned on filing for divorce at first. It was far from certain a court would even grant such a petition, and she’d assumed he’d be happy enough to still have her money that he wouldn’t mind her living without him. That maybe, if she didn’t enrage him further, he would let her go. After all, her money was the whole reason he’d married her—been forced to marry her, he would say.

But she’d been wrong. Oh, he hadn’t minded at first. But when the rumors about why she’d left him had started—too many people had seen the occasional visible bruising; too many servants had overheard their raised voices—he’d had to retaliate.

The articles started appearing about three weeks after her escape. They whispered of scandalous doings, of lovers and orgies and drunkenness, of having multiple men simultaneously, of opium addictions and tawdry quarrels. She knew who had planted them. Who was a more reliable source than her own husband?

Thus society had an alternate version of their separation, one that was far more interesting. Alain became the pitied husband, a man trying to cling to his honor in the face of a woman trying to drag him down. Alva became some cross between a witch and a whore, a sexual deviant of mammoth and terrifying proportions.

When she decided she had nothing left to lose, she met with a lawyer to discuss options for divorce. Two days later, he’d—no. She walked to the sitting room window and opened it, letting the cold air fill her lungs. There was plenty of it, she told herself. She could breathe the rest of her life and never run out. She could be greedy with it; she could even take more than her share.

She never needed to think of that night again, of gold buttons with dragons on them, emerald wallpaper fading to gray—no, she would not think of it. She pressed her hand against the bottom of the window frame, letting the sharp metal push into her skin until the discomfort cleared her mind. She wasn’t going back there. She didn’t have to; no one could make her.

It had been almost exactly ten months later that Alain had been killed, dying alone in a refuse-filled alley behind one of the casinos he had loved. She remembered reading about it in the evening paper the next day, eating alone at the table in her hotel room. She remembered pouring herself a glass of wine, and how different it had tasted. The taste of a prison wall that had suddenly vanished. Of freedom.

A false promise, it turned out. She hadn’t escaped him.