“You’ve spent ten years serving me like a maid, Emily—so if burning your hand is what it takes to remind you that your only job is to obey your husband, then consider this your lesson.”

Emily met attorney Dana Rosenthal in a glass-walled office above a bakery in Southport.

Dana asked practical questions first: Were there children? No. Were there weapons in the house? No. Had Ivan been physically aggressive before? Not like this in front of people, but there had been grips, shoves, blocked doors, and one night two summers earlier when he slapped the wall beside Emily’s head so hard a framed print crashed into the hallway.

Dana listened without theatrical sympathy.

“You have two separate issues,” she said. “Personal safety and whatever this Monday reference means.”

Emily handed over screenshots of Ivan’s texts and played part of the patio conversation.

Dana frowned.

“Do you know what happens Monday?”

“Board dinner. Promotion vote.”

“Anything financial tied to it?”

Emily thought.

Ivan’s title change to Senior Vice President of Hospital Relations came with equity participation in Stratton’s private ownership plan. He had talked about it for months, always in the vaguest possible terms—retention shares, long-term alignment, leadership trust.

Emily had stopped listening closely because every conversation became about how much pressure he was under and how grateful she should be if it worked out.

Then she remembered one detail.

Two weeks earlier, Ivan had asked Emily to gather tax records and trust statements for “the financial planner.” When she asked why the planner needed her inherited brokerage numbers, he said it was easier to review everything together.

She had refused because she was leaving for a freelance hotel opening in Boston and didn’t have time.

He had been irritated for days.

Dana asked, “Did you ever send those records?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Emily blinked.

“Why good?”

Dana folded her hands. “Because men who talk vaguely about ‘alignment’ and then grip their wives over a grill often mean something specific.”

On the drive back to Claire’s, Emily searched Ivan’s home printer history from the household network. She found scanned PDFs from Thursday night.

One was a Stratton compensation packet.

Another was labeled Spousal Consent Addendum.

Emily opened it.

The document concerned Ivan’s participation in Stratton’s equity plan. Because Connecticut was an equitable-distribution state and some contribution might later be deemed marital property, the company required disclosure and acknowledgement from a spouse.

Emily had never signed it.

But near the bottom, a line had been flagged in yellow.

Dana was right.