And the next one.

And the one after that.

And slowly, over months, in stolen hours, on a laptop I kept in a place Roman never looked, I stopped being a wife who suspected and became something else entirely: an investigator, patient and methodical, assembling a picture of the truth one verified fact at a time.

It was lonely work, and frightening, and slow.

There were nights I was certain I was imagining all of it, that Roman and Marion were right and I was the unstable one, that I would assemble my careful binder and open it in a courtroom and a judge would look at me with pity and dismiss it as the fantasy of a bitter woman.