I don't perform the ordinary wife anymore. That experiment is over, and it told me everything I needed to know. I am exactly who I am: Caroline Remington, daughter of a commander, mother of a wonderful boy, a woman who was underestimated by people who mistook her silence for weakness, right up until the afternoon she made one phone call and took back a life that was always hers.
I do one thing now that matters to me. I work with programs that help new mothers leaving unsafe or unkind marriages — because most of the women who get handed twelve dollars and told to take the bus don't have a four-star father and an SUV in their own name. They have nothing, and nowhere to go, and a newborn against their chest. I had a way out that they don't. So I spend my resources building ways out for them, because no woman should have to stand bleeding on a sidewalk holding her baby, deciding whether kindness from strangers hurts more than cruelty from the man who promised to love her.
