For a year before that hearing, while Roman believed I was a defeated woman drifting numbly toward a divorce that would leave me with nothing, I had been, quietly, in the dark, building.

It started the night I found the first discrepancy — a number in our accounts that did not match the story Roman had told me about it, a small thing, the kind of thing I had trained myself for years to ignore because noticing it caused fights I always lost.

But that night, for reasons I still cannot fully name, I did not ignore it.

I wrote it down.