Garrett had every reason to pull on the thread I’d handed him.

My ex-husband’s name was on his audit; I had been married to a man tangled in the fraud he was trying to expose; the temptation to lean on me, to ask what I knew about Trevor, to use my history as leverage, would have been enormous, and no one would have blamed him for it.

And he simply declined.

He set the whole thing down and told me my past was mine.

For twelve years I had lived with people who treated every private thing about me as a shared family resource — my time, my body’s failure to make a child, my opinions, my exits, all of it open for comment and use.