He had been in blind panic, believing I was about to expose his family before he could find a way to fix the damage himself — before he could get ahead of a catastrophe he had spent two years privately dreading.

I sat with that for a long time, and it humbled me more than I expected.

I had been married to this man for eight years, and I had constructed, over those years and especially over the bitter months of our divorce, a clean and satisfying story about who he was: the arrogant heir, the mother’s boy, the man who snapped at me to be grateful and let his family drain my accounts.

And that story was not false, exactly.