The Bankruptcy of the Heart
My name is Laura Mitchell, and three years ago, my life was liquidated. It wasn’t a foreclosure on a house or a collapse of a stock portfolio, though those financial terms would later become the vocabulary of my salvation. It was a complete, systemic collapse of the human spirit.
I met my husband, Andrew Collins, when we were both junior analysts at a boutique consulting firm in downtown Boston. The air in the office was always cold, smelling of stale coffee and ozone from the copiers, but Andrew was a warm spot in a gray world. He was intelligent, possessing a quiet, unassuming ambition that I found magnetic. He wasn’t loud; he didn’t beat his chest like the sales guys. He just did the work.
What I didn’t fully understand back then—what I was too blinded by love to see—was that his quietness wasn’t peace. It was submission. Andrew was a man constructed entirely of other people’s expectations, and the architect of his existence was his mother, Evelyn Collins.
